“What are you thinking about, Mary?” persisted the other.
“Oh, about all kinds of things; mysteries, for instance, and about how little we know of what's going on in each other's minds. You are about as transparent a person as one could have, and yet half the time, now I come to think of it, I don't seem to know what you would be at. A little while ago you joined with Constance in that attack on me. I am just asking myself, 'Would it have been pleasant to you if Jack had gone away yesterday happy and triumphant—if I had promised him my hand?'”
“Your hand, Mary—how can you ask such a question? How could you imagine such a thing?”
“Does it seem so dreadful a thing? Have you not worked on me to make me forgive and think well of him? You do not think his repentance all a sham; you have forgotten the past, are his friend, and trust him. Do you, in spite of it all, still think evil of him and separate him from other men? Was the thief on the cross who repented a less welcome guest at that supper he was invited to because of his evil deeds? And is this man, in whose repentance you really believe, less a child of God than other men, that you make this strange distinction?”
The girl cast down her eyes and was silent for some time.
“Mary,” she spoke at length, “I can't explain it, but I do feel that there is a difference—that it is not wrong to make such a distinction. It is in us already made, and we can't unmake it. I know that I feel everything you have said about him, and I am very, very glad that you too have forgiven him and are his friend. But it would have been horrible if you had felt for him again as you did once.”
Mary turned her face away, her eyes growing dim with tears of mingled pain and happiness; for how long it had taken her to read the soul that was so easy to read, so crystalline, and how much it would have helped her if she could have understood it sooner! But now the shameful cup had passed for ever from her, and the loved girl at her side had never discovered, never suspected, how near to her lips it had been.
And while she stood thus, while Fan waited for her to turn her face, hard by there sounded a great clatter and rattling of the old ramshackle machine, and pounding of the donkey's hoofs on the gravel, and vigorous thwacks from sticks and hands and hats on his rump by his backers, accompanied with much noise of cheering and shouting.
“Oh, look; it is all over!” cried Mary. “What a shame to miss it after all—what could we have been thinking about! Come, let's go and find out who won. I shall give sixpence to the winner, just to encourage local sport.”
“And I,” said Fan, “shall give a shilling to the loser—to encourage—” In her haste she did not say what.