What was this that he had touched? She looked up at him steadily, her hands clasped about her knees, the childlike rose-glow and light banished from her face.
"I am not like other women. You speak truer than you know. You call me a silly, happy child. Maybe I am; but, Paul, once in my life God punished me. I don't know for what,"—getting up, and stretching out her groping arms, blindly.
There was a sudden silence. This was not the cheery, healthful Grey Gurney of a moment before, this woman with the cold terror creeping out in her face. He caught her hands and held them.
"I don't know for what," she moaned. "He did it. He is good."
He watched the slow change in her face: it made his hands tremble as they held hers. No longer a child, but a woman whose soul the curse had touched. Miriam, leprous from God's hand, might have thus looked up to Him without the camp. Blecker drew her closer. Was she not his own? He would defend her against even this God, for whom he cared but little.
"What has been done to you, child?"
She shook herself free, speaking in a fast, husky whisper.
"Do not touch me, Dr. Blecker. It was no school-girl's whim that kept me from you. I am not like other women. I am not worthy of any man's love."
"I think I know what you mean," he said, gravely. "I know your story, Grey. They made you live a foul lie once. I know it all. You were a child then."
She had gone still farther from him, holding by the trunk of a dead tree, her face turned towards the water. The black sough of wind from it lifted her hair, and dampened her forehead. The man's brain grew clearer, stronger, somehow, as he looked at her; as thought does in the few electric moments of life when sham and conventionality crumble down like ashes, and souls stand bare, face to face. For the every-day, cheery, unselfish Grey of the coarse life in yonder he cared but little; it was but the husk that held the woman whose nature grappled with his own, that some day would take it with her to the Devil or to God. He knew that. It was this woman that stood before him now: looking back, out of the inbred force and purity within her, the indignant man's sense of honor that she had, on the lie they had made her live: daring to face the truth, that God had suffered this thing, yet clinging, like a simple child, to her old faith in Him. That childish faith, that worked itself out in her common life, Paul Blecker set aside, in loving her. She was ignorant: he knew the world, and, he thought, very plainly saw that the Power who had charge of it suffered unneeded ills, was a traitor to the Good his own common sense and kindly feeling could conceive; which is the honest belief of most of the half-thinkers in America.