He thrust her hands from his arms, and went about the room with long, unsteady strides.
"I cannot lie to God! I cannot lie!" he said.
His wife, seeing his face, when he turned, cried hurriedly,—
"It is a trifle; let it go, Jerome. I can give you my little gifts all the same; it is a trifle."
Down below his credulous simplicity and the weight of borrowed ideas with which books had loaded his brain, (borrowed infidelity with the rest,) M. Jacobus was a sturdy, honest man, with a keen sense of honor: it was no trifle to him. She saw that some rough touch of hers had reached a secret depth of his soul never bared to her before.
"What is it, Jerome?"—coming up to catch him again with her trembling hand. "It is to me a matter of so little import!"
He stopped.
"It is this to me. She did keep it,—my mother. It is my first remembrance of our home,—when she was dead. We children made yet a feast upon that day, that she might look back and see. Now that I am no longer a child, and know that she can never look back, that what was my mother is but a heap of bones and dust, I—I cannot keep the day."
She stood in his way.
"Dead is dead!" he cried, fiercely, "When I know that she and the child I loved cannot speak or look at me more than this stone at my feet, I cannot believe in the day on which you say He came to bring eternal life."