She turned on me with a look of fury.
“He shall answer,” she cried.
I saw, or thought I saw, signs of yielding in his face. “Take time,” I persisted—“take time to consider before you decide.”
She stepped up to me.
“Take time?” she repeated. “Are you inhuman enough to talk of time, in my presence?”
She laid the sleeping child on her bed, and fell on her knees before the Minister: “I promise to hear your exhortations—I promise to do all a woman can to believe and repent. Oh, I know myself! My heart, once hardened, is a heart that no human creature can touch. The one way to my better nature—if I have a better nature—is through that poor babe. Save her from the workhouse! Don’t let them make a pauper of her!” She sank prostrate at his feet, and beat her hands in frenzy on the floor. “You want to save my guilty soul,” she reminded him furiously. “There’s but one way of doing it. Save my child!”
He raised her. Her fierce tearless eyes questioned his face in a mute expectation dreadful to see. Suddenly, a foretaste of death—the death that was so near now!—struck her with a shivering fit: her head dropped on the Minister’s shoulder. Other men might have shrunk from the contact of it. That true Christian let it rest.
Under the maddening sting of suspense, her sinking energies rallied for an instant. In a whisper, she was just able to put the supreme question to him.
“Yes? or No?”
He answered: “Yes.”