Leam stood by him as pale as the shattered lilies in the garden.  What could she do?  How could she comfort him?  Tainted and dishonored, she dared not even lay her hand on his—­her infamous and murderous hand, and he so pure and noble!  Neither could she pray for him, nor yet for herself.  Pray? to whom?  To God?  God had turned His face away from her, even as her lover had now turned away his:  He was angry with her, and still unappeased.  She dared not pray to Him, and He would not hear her if she did.  The saints were no longer the familiar and parental deities, grave and helpful, to whom she could refer all her sorrows and perplexities, as in earlier times, sure of speedy succor.  The teaching of the later days had destroyed the simple fetichism of childhood; and now—­afraid of God, by whom she was unforgiven; the saints swept out of her spiritual life like those mist-wreaths of morning which were once taken for solid towers and impregnable fortresses; the Holy Mother vanished with the rest; all spiritual help a myth, all spiritual consolation gone—­how could she pray?  Lonely as her life had been since mamma died, it had never been so lonely as now, when she felt that God had abandoned her, and that she had sacrificed her lover to her sense of truth and honor and what was due to his nobility.

She stood by him and watched his passionate outburst with anguish infinitely more intense than his own.  To have caused him this sorrow was worse than to have endured it for herself.  There was no sacrifice of self that she could not have made for his good.  Spaniard as she was, she would have been above jealousy if another woman would have made him happier than she; and if her death would have given him gain or joy, she would have died for him as another would have lived.  Yet it was she, and she only, who was causing him this pain, who was destroying his happiness and breaking his heart.

She dared not speak nor move.  It took all the strength she drew from silence to keep her from breaking into a more terrible storm of grief than even that into which he had fallen.  She dared not make a sign, but simply stood there, doing her best to bear her heavy burden to the end.  The only feeling that she had for herself was that it was cruel not to let her die, and why did not mute anguish kill her?

For the rest, she knew that she had done the thing that was right, however hard.  It was not fitting that she should be his wife; and it was better that he should suffer for the moment than be degraded for all time by association with one so shameful, so dishonored, as herself.

Presently, Edgar cleared his eyes and lifted up his face.  He was angry with himself for this unmanly burst of feeling, and because angry with himself disposed for the moment to be hard on her.  She was standing there in exactly the same spot and just the same attitude as before, her head a little bent, her hands twined in each other, her eyes with the pleading, frightened look of confession turned timidly to him; but as he raised himself from the sofa, pushing back his hair and striding to the window as if to hide the fact of his having shed tears, she turned her eyes to the floor.  She was beginning to feel now that she must not even look at him.  The gulf that separated them, dug by her own ineffaceable crime, was so deep, the distance so wide!