“And now,” he said, after four days, “I must go to Cleaver’s Clearing”—­the Clearing was twenty hard miles away.  “There are children there who never heard of God until I took some toys to them last Christmas.  Then they thought that I was God.  They are sick now, poor children—­bad food; no care—­ah! well, they will learn, they will learn.”

And the old man rode away.

And still Doris had not seen Meredith’s child.

“I cannot, Sister,” she had pleaded.  “I can think of it only as George Thornton’s child.”

The hate in Doris’s heart was so new and appalling a sensation that it frightened her.

She tried to think of the unseen child with the love that she felt for all children—­but that one!  She struggled to overcome the sickening aversion that grew, instead of lessened, while the days dragged on.  But always the helpless child represented nothing but passion, brutality, suffering, and disgrace.  It was not a child, a piteous, pleading child—­it was the essence of Wrong made visible.

Sister Angela was deeply concerned.  The unnatural attitude called forth her old manner of authority.  Sitting alone with Doris before the fire in the living room the evening of Meredith’s funeral and Father Noble’s departure she grew stern and commanding.

“This will never do, my dear,” she said.  “It cannot be that life has made of you a cruel, unjust woman.”

Doris dropped her eyes—­they were wonderful eyes, her real and only claim to beauty.  Dusky eyes they were, with a light in them of amber.

“How much did Merry tell you?” she asked, faintly, for the older woman looked so frail and pure that it seemed impossible that she knew the worst.

“My dear, she told me—­nothing.  Her letter said that she wanted to tell me things—­things that she could not tell to God”—­Angela unconsciously touched her cross—­“but there was no time.  No time.”

“There are things that women cannot tell to God, Sister.  Things that they can only tell to some women!”

A bitterness that she could not control shook Doris’s voice.  She shrank from touching the exquisite detachment of Sister Angela by the truth, and yet she must have as much sympathy as possible and, certainly, cooeperation.

“Sister, this child should never have been born!”

The words reached where former words had failed.  A flush touched Angela’s white face—­it was like sunrise on snow.  Then, after a pause: 

“Did—­Meredith—­think that?” A growing sternness gave Doris hope that she might be saved the details that were like poison in her blood.

“Yes.  Protected by—­by what is law—­George Thornton——­”

But Angela raised her thin, transparent hand commandingly.  It was as if she were staying the torrents of wrong and shame that threatened to deluge all that she had gained by her life of renunciation and repression—­and yet in her clear eyes there gleamed the understanding of the depths.