repent?'

'If they do, they do well for themselves.'

'You would see them in sackcloth and ashes?'

'I would pray to be spared seeing them.'

'You can entirely forget--well, other moments, other feelings?'

'They may heighten the injury.'

'Carinthia, I should wish to speak plainly, if I could, and tell
you....'

'You speak quite plainly, my lord.'

'You and I cannot be strangers or enemies.'

'We cannot be, I would not be. To be friends, we should be separate.'

'You say you are a woman; you have a heart, then?'--for, if not, what
have you? was added in the tone.

'My heart is my brother's,' she said.

'All your heart?'

'My heart is my brother's until one of us drops.'

'There is not another on earth beside your brother Chillon?'

'There is my child.'

The dwarf square tower of Croridge village church fronted them against
the sky, seen of both.

'You remember it,' he said; and she answered: 'I was married there.'

'You have not forgotten that injury, Carinthia?'

'I am a mother.'

'By all the saints! you hit hard. Justly. Not you. Our deeds are the
hard hitters. We learn when they begin to flagellate, stroke upon
stroke! Suppose we hold a costly thing in the hand and dash it to the
ground--no recovery of it, none! That must be what your father meant. I
can't regret you are a mother. We have a son, a bond. How can I describe
the man I was!' he muttered,--'possessed! sort of werewolf! You are my
wife?'

'I was married to you, my lord.'

'It's a tie of a kind.'

'It binds me.'

'Obey, you said.'

'Obey it. I do.'

'You consider it holy?'

'My father and my mother spoke to me of the marriage-tie. I read the
service before I stood at the altar. It is holy. It is dreadful. I will
be true to it.'

'To your husband?'

'To his name, to his honour.'

'To the vow to live with him?'

'My husband broke that for me.'

'Carinthia, if he bids you, begs you to renew it? God knows what you may
save me from!'

'Pray to God. Do not beg of me, my lord. I have my brother and my little
son. No more of husband for me! God has given me a friend, too,--a man
of humble heart, my brother's friend, my dear Rebecca's husband. He can
take them from me: no one but God. See the splendid sky we have.'

With those words she barred the gates on him; at the same time she
bestowed the frank look of an amiable face brilliant in the lively red
of her exercise, in its bent-bow curve along the forehead, out of t