“My God is a jealous God,” Arnold said. “He has delivered me—into His own hands—for the honour of His name. I acknowledge—I am content.”
“No, indeed no! It was a wicked, horrible chance! Don't charge your God with it.”
His smile was very sweet, but it paid the least possible attention. “You did love me,” he said. He spoke as if he were already dead.
“I did indeed,” Hilda replied, and bent her shamed head upon her hands again in the confession. It is not strange that he heard only the affirmation in it.
He stroked her hair. “It is good to know that,” he said, “very, good. I should have married you.” He went on with sudden boldness and a new note of strength in his voice, “Think of that! You would have been mine—to protect and work for. We should have gone together to England—where I could easily have got a curacy—easily.”
Hilda looked up. “Would you like to marry me now?” she asked eagerly, but he shook his head.
“You don't understand,” he said. “It is the dear sin God has turned my back upon.”
Then it came to her that he had asked for no caress. He was going unassoiled to his God, with the divine indifference of the dying. Only his imagination looked backward and forward. And she thought, “It is a little light flame that I have lit with my own taper that has gone out—that has gone out—and presently the grave will extinguish that.” She sat quiet and sombre in the growing darkness, and presently Arnold slept.
He slept through the bringing of a lamp, the arrival of flowers, subdued knocks of inquirers who would not be stayed by the bulletin—the visit of Surgeon-Major Wills, who felt his pulse without wakening him. “Holding out wonderfully,” the doctor said. “Don't rouse him for the soup. He'll go out in about six hours without any pain. May not wake at all.”
The door opened again to admit the probationer come to relieve Miss Howe. Hilda beckoned her into the corridor. “You can go back,” she said, “I will take your turn.”