One would not say that Hilda hesitated, for there was no failing in the wings of her high confidence, but she looked at him in a brave silence. Her glance had tender investigation in it; she stood on the brink of her words just long enough to ask whether they would hurt him. Seeing that they would, she nevertheless plunged, but with infinite compassion and consideration. She spoke like an agent of Fate, conscious and grieved.
"I understand," she said simply. "Sometimes, you know, we are quicker. And you in your cell, how should you find out? That is why I must tell you, because, though I am a woman, you are a priest. Partly for that reason I may speak, partly because I love you, Stephen Arnold, better and more ardently than you can ever love me, or anybody, I think, except, perhaps, your God. And I am tired of keeping silence."
She was so direct, so unimpassioned, that half his distress turned to astonishment, and he faced her as if a calm and reasoned hand had been laid upon the confusion in him. Meeting his gaze, she unbarred a flood-gate of happy tenderness in her eyes.
"Love!" he gasped in it, "I have nothing to do with that."
"Oh," she said, "you have everything to do with it."
Something leaped in him without asking his permission, assuring him that he was a man, until then a placid theory with an unconscious basis. It was therefore a blow to his saintship, or it would have been, but he warded it off, flushed and trembling. It was as if he had been ambuscaded. He had to hold himself from the ignominy of flight; he rose to cut his way out, making an effort to strike with precision.
"Some perversity has seized you," he said. The muscles about his mouth quivered, giving him a curious aspect. "You mean nothing of what you say."
"Do you believe that?"
"I—I cannot think anything else. It is the only way I can—I can—make excuse."
"Ah, don't excuse me!" she murmured, with an astonishing little gay petulance.