The childish flush left her face; the timid woman-look was in it now.  He bent nearer.

“They stand there alone, Grey.”

She drew back from him, her hands nervously catching in the thick curls.

“You do not believe that?” his breath clogged and hot.  “It is a fancy of mine? not true?”

“It is true.”

He caught the whisper, his face growing pale, his eyes flashing.

“Then you are mine, child!  What is the meaning of these paltry contradictions?  Why do you evade me from day to day?”

“You promised me not to speak of this again,”—­weakly.

“Pah!  You have a man’s straightforward, frank instinct, Grey; and this is cowardly,—­paltry, as I said before.  I will speak of it again.  To-night is all that is left to me.”

He seated her upon the beech-trunk.  One could tell by the very touch and glance of the man how the image of this woman stood solitary in his coarser thoughts, delicate, pure:  a disciple would have laid just such reverential fingers on the robe of the Madonna.  Then he stood off from her, looking straight into her hazel eyes.  Grey, with all her innocent timidity, was the cooler, stronger, maybe, of the two:  the poor Doctor’s passionate nature, buffeted from one anger and cheat to another in the world, brought very little quiet or tact or aptitude in language for this one hour.  Yet, standing there, his man’s sturdy heart throbbing slow as an hysteric woman’s, his eyeballs burning, it seemed to him that all his life had been but the weak preface to these words he was going to speak.

“It angers me,” he muttered, abruptly, “that, when I come to you with the thought that a man’s or a woman’s soul can hold but once in life, you put me aside with the silly whims of a schoolgirl.  It is not worthy of you, Grey.  You are not as other women.”

What was this that he had touched?  She looked up at him steadily, her hands clasped about her knees, the childlike rose-glow and light banished from her face.

“I am not like other women.  You speak truer than you know.  You call me a silly, happy child.  Maybe I am; but, Paul, once in my life God punished me.  I don’t know for what,”—­getting up, and stretching out her groping arms, blindly.

There was a sudden silence.  This was not the cheery, healthful Grey Gurney of a moment before, this woman with the cold terror creeping out in her face.  He caught her hands and held them.

“I don’t know for what,” she moaned.  “He did it.  He is good.”

He watched the slow change in her face:  it made his hands tremble as they held hers.  No longer a child, but a woman whose soul the curse had touched.  Miriam, leprous from God’s hand, might have thus looked up to Him without the camp.  Blecker drew her closer.  Was she not his own?  He would defend her against even this God, for whom he cared but little.

“What has been done to you, child?”