"God Himself has taken your punishment into His own Hands."

Again he seemed to hear Catherine’s accusing tones, and the fanatical strain inbred in him answered like a boat to its helm.  There must be no more compromise, no longer any evasion of the issues of right and wrong.  He had sinned, and both he and the woman for whose sake he had defied his own creed, and that of his fathers before him, must make atonement.  He drew himself up, and stood stiff and unbending beside the bed.  In his light-grey eyes there shone that same indomitable ardour of the zealot which had shone in Catherine’s.

“No,” he said.  “I am not angry that the child is a girl.  I accept it as a just retribution.”

No man possessed of the ordinary instincts of common humanity would have so greeted his wife just when she had emerged, spent and exhausted, from woman’s supreme conflict with death.  But the fanatic loses sight of normal values, and Hugh, obsessed by his newly conceived idea of atoning for the sin of his marriage, was utterly oblivious of the enormity of his conduct as viewed through unbiased eyes.

The woman who had just fought her way through the Valley of the Shadow stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“Retribution?” she repeated blankly.

“For my marriage—­our marriage.”

Diane’s breath came faster.

“What—­what do you mean?” she asked falteringly.  Suddenly a look of sheer terror leaped into her eyes, and she clutched at Hugh’s sleeve.  “Oh, you’re not going to be like Catherine?  Say you’re not!  Hugh, you’ve always said she was crazy to call our marriage a sin. . . . A sin!” She tried to laugh, but the laugh stuck in her throat, caught and pinned there by the terror that gripped her.

“Yes, I’ve said that.  I’ve said it because I wanted to think it,” he returned remorselessly, “not because I really thought it.”

Diane dragged herself up on to her elbow.

“I don’t understand.  You’ve not changed?” Then, as he made no answer:  “Hugh, you’re frightening me!  What do you mean?  What has Catherine been saying to you?”

Her voice rose excitedly.  A patch of feverish colour appeared on either cheek.  Old Virginie sprung up from her chair by the fire, alarmed.

“You excite madame!”

Hugh turned to leave the room.

“We’ll discuss this another time, Diane,” he said.

Diane moved her head fretfully.

“No.  Now—­now!  Don’t go!  Hugh!”

Her voice rose almost to a scream and simultaneously the nurse came hurrying in from the adjoining room.  She threw one glance at the patient, huddled flushed and excited against the pillows, then without more ado she marched up to Hugh and, taking him by the shoulders with her small, capable hands, she pushed him out of the room.

“Do you want to kill your wife?” she demanded in a low voice of concentrated anger.  “If so, you’re going the right way about it.”