"My mother knew all. If Greta had been my half-sister, would she have stood by and witnessed our love?"
Hugh waved his hand deprecatingly.
"Your mother was as ignorant of the propinquity as you were. Robert Lowther was dead before she settled at Newlands. The survivors knew nothing of each other. The secret of that early and ill-fated marriage was buried with him."
"Destiny itself would have prevented it, for destiny shapes its own ends, and shapes them for the best," said Paul.
"Yes, destiny is shaping them now," said Hugh, "here, and in me. This is the point to which the pathways of your lives have tended. They meet here—and part."
Paul's ashy face smiled.
"Then nature would have prevented it," he said. "If this thing had been true, do you think we should not have known it—she and I—in the natural recoil of our own hearts? When true hearts meet, there is that within which sanctions their love, and says it is good. That is Heaven's own license. No sanction of the world or the world's law, no earthly marriage is like to that, for it is the marriage first made by nature itself. Our hearts have met, hers and mine, and the same nature has sanctioned our love and sanctified it. And against that last, that first, that highest arbiter, do you ask me to take the evidence of these poor, pitiful papers? Away with them!" Paul's eyes were bright, his face had lost its shadows.
"That is very beautiful, no doubt," said Hugh, and he smiled deeply. "But I warn you to beware."
"I have no fear," said Paul.
"See to it, I tell you. These lofty emotions leave a void that only a few homely facts can fill. Verify them."