n a vague, grey, monitory form, a cloud, a portent, a chill menace; but
it came, and he paled under it. He seemed to lean upon his own hands,
pressed one on each side of him to the seat of the sofa for support, and
he looked in fixed silence at the shapely white thing on his knee. His
face seemed to wither, new lines came upon it as the impression grew in
him, and the glamour faded out of hers as she was sharply reminded,
looking at him, that he had not traversed the waste with her, that she
had kept her vigils alone. Yet it was all said and done, and there was
no repentance in her. She only gathered herself together, and fell back,
as it were, upon her magnificent position. As she drew her hand away, he
dropped his face into the cover of his own, leaning his elbow on his
knee, and there was a pulsing silence. The instant prolonged itself.

"Are you praying?" Hilda asked, with much gentleness, almost a
child-like note; and he shook his head. There was another instant's
pause, and she spoke again.

"Are you so grieved, then," she said, "that this has come upon us?"

Again he held his eyes away from her, clasping his hands and looking at
the thing nearest to him, while at last blood from the heart of the
natural man in him came up and stained his face, his forehead under the
thin ruffling of colourless hair, his neck above the white band that was
his badge of difference from other men.

"I--fear--I hardly understand," he said. The words fell cramped and
singly, and his lip twitched. "It--it is impossible to think----"

His eyes went in her direction, but lacked courage to go all the way. He
looked as if he dared not lift his head.

One would not say that Hilda hesitated, for there was no failing in the
wings of her high confidence, but she looked at him in a brave silence.
Her glance had tender investigation in it; she stood on the brink of her
words just long enough to ask whether they would hurt him. Seeing that
they would, she nevertheless plunged, but with infinite compassion and
consideration. She spoke like an agent of Fate, conscious and grieved.

"_I_ understand," she said simply. "Sometimes, you know, we are quicker.
And you in your cell, how should you find out? That is why I must tell
you, because, though I am a woman, you are a priest. Partly for that
reason I may speak, partly because I love you, Stephen Arnold, better
and more ardently than you can ever love me, or anybody, I think,
except, perhaps, yo