t it makes no difference?"

He avoided her challenging glance. "What's done is done," he muttered.

"Is it ever, quite, I wonder?" she mused. He made no answer and they
lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel of
communication.

It was she who, after awhile, began to speak with a new suffusing
diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her.

"Don't they say," she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender
apprehensiveness, "that the early Christians, instead of pulling down
the heathen temples--the temples of the unclean gods--purified them by
turning them to their own uses? I've always thought one might do that
with one's actions--the actions one loathes but can't undo. One can
make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall
against them...." Her voice wavered on the word. "We can't always tear
down the temples we've built to the unclean gods, but we can put
good spirits in the house of evil--the spirits of mercy and shame and
understanding, that might never have come to us if we hadn't been in
such great need...."

She moved over to him and laid a hesitating hand on his. His head was
bent and he did not change his attitude. She sat down beside him without
speaking; but their silences now were fertile as rain-clouds--they
quickened the seeds of understanding.

At length he looked up. "I don't know," he said, "what spirits have come
to live in the house of evil that I built--but you're there and that's
enough for me. It's strange," he went on after another pause, "she
wished the best for me so often, and now, at last, it's through her that
it's come to me. But for her I shouldn't have known you--it's through
her that I've found you. Sometimes, do you know?--that makes it
hardest--makes me most intolerable to myself. Can't you see that it's
the worst thing I've got to face? I sometimes think I could have
borne it better if you hadn't understood! I took everything from
her--everything--even to the poor shelter of loyalty she'd trusted
in--the only thing I could have left her!--I took everything from her,
I deceived her, I despoiled her, I destroyed her--and she's given me YOU
in return!"

His wife's cry caught him up. "It isn't that she's given ME to you--it
is that she's given you to yourself." She leaned to him as though swept
forward on a wave of pity. "Don't you see," she went on, as his eyes
hung on her, "that that's the gift you can't escape from, the debt
you