Sylvia looked at the lawyer, and her face was ghastly.  “Do you mean to say that I have been thinking I was committing theft, when I wasn’t, all this time?” said she.

“I certainly do.”

Henry went to Sylvia and took hold of her arm, but she did not seem to heed him.  “I was just as guilty,” said she, firmly, “for I had the knowledge of sin in my heart and I held it there.  I was just as guilty.”

She stared helplessly at the worthless will which she still held.  A young girl tittered softly.  Sylvia turned towards the sound.  “There is no occasion to laugh,” said she, “at one who thought she was sinning, and has had the taste of sin in her soul, even though she was not doing wrong.  The intention was there.”

Sylvia stopped.  Rose had both arms around her, and was kissing her and whispering.  Sylvia pushed her gently away.  “Now,” she said to the minister, “you can go on with your marrying.  Even if Mr. Meeks had told me before what he has just told me here in your presence, I should have had to speak out.  I’ve carried it on my shoulders and in my heart just as long as I could and live and walk and speak under it, let alone saying my prayers.  I don’t say I haven’t got to carry it now, for I have, as long as I live; but telling you all about it was the only way I could shift a little of the heft of it.  Now I feel as if the Lord Almighty was helping me carry the burden, and always would.  That’s all I’ve got to say.  Now you can go on with your marrying.”

Sylvia stepped back.  There was a hush, then a solemn murmur of one voice, broken at intervals by other hushes and low responses.

When it was over, and the bridal pair stood in the soft shadow of their bridal flowers—­Rose’s white garment being covered with a lace-like tracery of vines and bride roses, and her head with its chaplet of orange-blossoms shining out clearly with a white radiance from the purple mist of leaves and flowers, which were real, yet unreal, and might have been likened to her maiden dreams—­Henry and Sylvia came first to greet them.

Henry’s dress-suit fitted well, but his shoulders, bent with his life-work over the cutting-table, already moulded it.  No tailor on earth could overcome the terrible, triumphant rigidity of that back fitted for years to its burden of toil.  However, the man’s face was happy with a noble happiness.  He simply shook hands, with awkward solemnity, with the two, but in his heart was great, unselfish exultation.

“This man,” he was saying to himself, “has work to do that won’t grind him down and double him up, soul and body, like a dumb animal.  He can take care of his wife, and not let her get bent, either, and the Lord knows I’m thankful.”

He felt Sylvia’s little nervous hand on his arm, and a great tenderness for her was over him.  He had not a thought of blame or shame on her account.

Instead, he looked at Rose, blooming under her bridal flowers, not so much smiling as beaming with a soft, remote radiance, like a star, and he said to himself:  “Thank the Lord that she will never get so warped and twisted as to what is right and wrong by the need of money to keep soul and body together, that she will have to do what my wife has done, and bear such a burden on her pretty shoulders.”