“I will not listen.  You are mad.  Your ‘sons or daughters’ could not be hurt by anyone before they had life.”

“They always had life.  Before the sea was made or the mountains were brought forth,

    ’Ere suns and moons could wax and wane,
    God thought on me his child,’

and on you and on every soul made for immortality by the growth that fresh birth gives it.  He loves us with an everlasting love.  No false mother can destroy a child’s soul, but she can destroy its flesh and so retard and interfere with its eternal growth.  This is the great sin—­the sin of blood-guiltiness—­any woman may commit it.”

“You talk sheer nonsense, John.  I do not believe anything you say.”

Then John went to a large Bible lying open on a table.  “Listen, then,” he said, “to the Word of God”; and with intense solemnity he read aloud to her the wonderful verses in the one-hundred-and-thirty-ninth Psalm, between the twelfth and seventeenth, laying particular stress on the sixteenth verse, “’Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being imperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.’  So then Jane, dear Jane, you see from the very, very first, when as yet no member of the child had been formed it was written down in God’s Book as a man or a woman yet to be.  All souls so written down, are the children of the Most High.  It was not only yourself and me you were wronging, Jane, you were sinning against the Father and lover of souls, for we are all ’the children of the most High.’”

But Jane was apparently unmoved.  “I am tired,” she said wearily.  “I want to go to my room.”

“I have other things to say to you, most important things.  Will you come here this evening after dinner?”

“No, I will not.  I am going to see mother.”

“Call at Hatton House as you come back, and I will meet you there.”

“I shall not come back today.  I feel ill—­and no wonder.”

“When will you return?”

“I don’t know.  I tell you I feel ill.”

“Then you had better not go to Harlow House.”

“Where else should a woman go in trouble but to her mother?  When her heart is breaking, then she knows that the nest of all nests is her mother’s breast.”

John wanted to tell her that God and a loving husband might and surely would help her, but when she raised her lovely, sad eyes brimming with tears and he saw how white and full of suffering her face was, he could not find in his heart to dispute her words.  For he suffered in seeing her suffer far more than she could understand.

At her own room door he left her and his heart was so heavy he could not go to the mill.  He could not think of gold and cotton while there was such an abyss between him and his wife.  Truly she had wronged and wounded him in an intolerable manner, but his great love could look beyond the wrong to her repentance and to his forgiveness.