il. When she spoke, her voice
was full of a profound sadness that irritated him instead of touching
him, for his nerves were strung to passion and out of tune with regret.

"The sin of it; the deadly sin!" she said.

"There is no sin in it," he answered; but she shook her veiled head.

And there was silence again, as on the day before, but the stillness was
of another kind. It was not the awful lull which goes before the
bursting of the storm, when the very air seems to start at the fall of a
leaf for fear lest it be already the thunder-clap. It was more like the
noiseless rising of the hungry flood that creeps up round the doomed
house, wherein is desperate, starving life, higher and higher, inch by
inch--the flood of rising fate.

"You say that there is no sin in it," she said, after a time. "You say
it, but you do not think it. You are a man--you have honour to lose--you
understand that, at least--"

"You are a woman, and you have humanity's right to be free. It is an
honourable right. You gave it up when you took that veil, not knowing
what it was that you gave up. You have done no wrong. You have done
nothing that any loving maiden need be ashamed of. I kissed you, for you
could not help yourself. That is the monstrous crime which you say is to
be punished with eternal damnation. It is monstrous that you should
think so. It is blasphemy to say that God made woman to lead a life of
suffering and daily misery, chained to a cross which it is agony to look
at, and shame to break from."

"Go--leave me. You are tempting me again." She spoke away from him, not
changing her position.

"If truth is temptation, I am tempting you, for I am showing you the
truth. The truth is this. When you were almost a child they began to
bend you and break you in the way they meant you to grow. You bent, but
you were not broken. Your nature is too strong. There is a life of your
own in you. It was against your will, and when you were just grown up,
they buried you, your beauty, your youth, your fresh young heart, your
voice and your genius--for it is nothing less. It was all done with
deliberate intention for the glory of your family, blasphemously
asserted to be the glory of God. It was pressed upon you, before you
knew what you were doing, and made pleasant to you before you knew what
it all meant. Your cross was cushioned for you and your crown of thorns
was gilded. They made the seat under the canopy seem a seat in heaven.
They