“Tell me plainly,” she cried, “is there something you can’t forgive?”

“There is something I can’t forget.”

“What is it?  Oh, what is it!  When my mother told poor little Kitty that her father was dead, are you even more sorry than I am that I allowed it?  Are you even more ashamed of me than I am of myself?”

“No.  I regret that you allowed it; but I understand how you were led into that error.  Your husband’s infidelity had shaken his hold on your respect for him and your sympathy with him, and had so left you without your natural safeguard against Mrs. Presty’s sophistical reasoning and bad example.  But for that wrong-doing, there is a remedy left.  Enlighten your child as you have enlightened me; and then—­I have no personal motive for pleading Mr. Herbert Linley’s cause, after what I have seen of him—­and then, acknowledge the father’s claim on the child.”

“Do you mean his claim to see her?”

“What else can I mean?  Yes! let him see her.  Do (God help me, now when it’s too late!)—­do what you ought to have done, on that accursed day which will be the blackest day in my calendar, to the end of my life.”

“What day do you mean?”

“The day when you remembered the law of man, and forgot the law of God; the day when you broke the marriage tie, the sacred tie, by a Divorce!”

She listened—­not conscious now of suspense or fear; she listened, with her whole heart in revolt against him.

“You are too cruel!” she declared.  “You can feel for me, you can understand me, you can pardon me in everything else that I have done.  But you judge without mercy of the one blameless act of my life, since my husband left me—­the act that protected a mother in the exercise of her rights.  Oh, can it be you?  Can it be you?”

“It can be,” he said, sighing bitterly; “and it is.”

“What horrible delusion possesses you?  Why do you curse the happy day, the blessed day, which saw me safe in the possession of my child?”

“For the worst and meanest of reasons,” he answered—­“a selfish reason.  Don’t suppose that I have spoken of Divorce as one who has had occasion to think of it.  I have had no occasion to think of it; I don’t think of it even now.  I abhor it because it stands between you and me.  I loathe it, I curse it because it separates us for life.”

“Separates us for life?  How?”

“Can you ask me?”

“Yes, I do ask you!”

He looked round him.  A society of religious persons had visited the hotel, and had obtained permission to place a copy of the Bible in every room.  One of those copies lay on the chimney-piece in Catherine’s room.  Bennydeck brought it to her, and placed it on the table near which she was sitting.  He turned to the New Testament, and opened it at the Gospel of Saint Matthew.  With his hand on the page, he said: