'I am in the toils,' I murmured, with grinding teeth.
'What a frightful curse!' she said, shuddering. 'It terrifies me to think of it. How hard it seems,' she continued, 'that the children should be cursed for the father's crimes.'
'But, Winifred, they are NOT so cursed,' I cried. 'It is all a hideous superstition: one of Man's idiotic lies!'
'Henry,' said she, shocked at my irreverence, 'it is so; the Bible says it, and all life shows it. Ah! I wonder what wretch committed the sacrilege, and why he had no pity on his poor innocent children!'
While she was talking, I stooped and picked up the casket from which the letters had been forced by the fall. She had not seen it. I put it in my pocket.
'Henry, I am so grieved for you,' said Winifred again, and she came and wound her fingers in mine.
Grieved for me! But where was her father's dead body? That was the thought that appalled me. Should we come upon it in the débris? What was to be done? Owing to the tide, there was no turning back now to Flinty Point. The projecting debris must be passed. There was no dallying for a moment. If we lingered we should be caught by the tide in Mousetrap Cove, and then nothing could save us. Suppose in passing the débris we should come upon her father's corpse. The idea was insupportable. 'Thank God, however, I murmured, 'she will not even then know the very worst; she will see the corpse of her father who has fallen with the cliff, but she need not and will not associate him with the sacrilege and the curse.'
As I picked up the letters that had been scattered from the casket, she said,
'I cannot get that dreadful curse out of my head; to think that the children of the despoiler should be cursed by God, and cursed by your father, and yet they are as innocent as I am.'
'Best to forget it,' said I, standing still, for I dared not move towards the débris.