“Dear heart, you do not frighten me.  You know how unaccountably fear deserts me in fearful moments.  But I know there’s nothing for either of us to fear now.  This is all in your tortured imagination, and there, though you had not seen me, it would have stayed; you never would have come to the act.  Arthur, your soul is not lost.  You who have pointed the way of escape and deliverance so clearly and savingly to so many, you need not miss it now yourself.”

“Idle words, Isabel,—­idle, idle words.  The very words of Christ are idle to me until I give you up.”

“Give me up, my husband?  Dear love, you cannot!  You shall not!  I will not be given up.  You haven’t the cause, and I haven’t the cause.”

“Oh, Isabel, I stole you!  And the curse of God has gone with the theft, and with every step of the thief, from the first day till now.  From the first day until now God has lifted that other man up and brought me down.  And yet, before God who said, Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, he loves you this moment—­now!—­with the love of a man for a woman.”

“Arthur, no!  If he did”—­

“Isabel, if he did not—­if he did not love you yet as before he lost you—­oh! if he did not love you infinitely more now than then—­he would not be Leonard Byington.  That is all my evidence, all my argument, all the ground of my hate; and I hate him with a hatred that has finished—­finished!—­with my heart, and is devouring my brain.”

“Oh, my poor husband, listen to”—­

“Listen to me!” he broke in.  “Listen before I lose the blessed impulse to say there is but one cure.  I must give you up to Leonard Byington.  Oh, let me speak!  I took you from him by law; by law I will give you back.”

“Do you mean divorce, Arthur?”

“I do.”

“On what ground?”

“On the ground of ill treatment.  You shall bring suit; I will plead guilty.”

She rose, with his temples still in her hands.  “Ah! whose words are idle now?”

She bent over him with eyes of passionate kindness.  “You did not take me from him.  You asked me to take you, and for better for worse, till death us do part, I took you, Arthur, knowing as much of any other man’s love for me as I know at this hour.  You could not steal me; the shame would be mine, to have let you.  You are no thief!  I am no stolen thing!  You shall be happy with me; you shall not give me up!”

He leaped to his feet and snatched her into his arms.  The babe cried sleepily from its mother’s room.  She tenderly disengaged herself, left him in the door, moved on to the child’s crib, and in the dim light of the bedside taper, facing him from beyond it, soothed the little one by her silent touch.

To Arthur, wan and frail though she was, the sight was heavenly fair, a vision of ineffable peace to which it seemed a sacrilege to draw nearer; but she beckoned, and he stole to the spot.  With the quieted babe in its crib between them, the pair knit arms about each other’s neck and kissed.