She shook herself free, speaking in a fast, husky whisper.

“Do not touch me, Dr. Blecker.  It was no school-girl’s whim that kept me from you.  I am not like other women.  I am not worthy of any man’s love.”

“I think I know what you mean,” he said, gravely.  “I know your story, Grey.  They made you live a foul lie once.  I know it all.  You were a child then.”

She had gone still farther from him, holding by the trunk of a dead tree, her face turned towards the water.  The black sough of wind from it lifted her hair, and dampened her forehead.  The man’s brain grew clearer, stronger, somehow, as he looked at her; as thought does in the few electric moments of life when sham and conventionality crumble down like ashes, and souls stand bare, face to face.  For the every-day, cheery, unselfish Grey of the coarse life in yonder he cared but little; it was but the husk that held the woman whose nature grappled with his own, that some day would take it with her to the Devil or to God.  He knew that.  It was this woman that stood before him now:  looking back, out of the inbred force and purity within her, the indignant man’s sense of honor that she had, on the lie they had made her live:  daring to face the truth, that God had suffered this thing, yet clinging, like a simple child, to her old faith in Him.  That childish faith, that worked itself out in her common life, Paul Blecker set aside, in loving her.  She was ignorant:  he knew the world, and, he thought, very plainly saw that the Power who had charge of it suffered unneeded ills, was a traitor to the Good his own common sense and kindly feeling could conceive; which is the honest belief of most of the half-thinkers in America.

“You were but a child,” he said again.  “It matters nothing to me, Grey.  It left no taint upon you.”

“It did,” she cried, passionately.  “I carry the marks of it to my grave.  I never shall be pure again.”

“Why did your God let you go down into such foulness, then?”—­the words broke from his lips irrepressibly.  “It was He who put you in the hands of a selfish woman; it was He who gave you a weak will.  It is He who suffers marriages as false as yours.  Why, child! you call it crime, the vow that bound you for that year to a man you loathed; yet the world celebrates such vows daily in every church in Christendom.”

“I know that";—­her voice had gone down into its quiet sob, like a little child’s.

She sat down on the ground, now, the long shore-grass swelling up around her, thrusting her fingers into the pools of eddying water, with a far-off sense of quiet and justice and cold beneath there.

“I don’t understand,” she said.  “The world’s wrong somehow.  I don’t think God does it.  There’s thousands of young girls married as I was.  Maybe, if I ’d told Him about it, it wouldn’t have ended as it did.  I did not think He cared for such things.”