“I am not to go any more into retreat?” he said, in grave interrogation; but the hint of rebuke in his voice was not in his heart, and she knew it.

“No!” she cried.  “You shall not be hidden away like that.  You shall not go alive into the tomb and leave me at the door.  Because I cannot bear it.”

She leaned toward him, and her hand fell lightly on his knee.  It was a claiming touch, and there was something in the unfolded sweetness of her face that was not ambiguous.  Arnold received the intelligence.  It came in a vague grey monitory form, a cloud, a portent, a chill menace; but it came, and he paled under it.  He seemed to lean upon his hands, pressed one on each side of him to the seat of the sofa for support, and he looked in fixed silence at hers, upon his knee.  His face seemed to wither, new lines came upon it as the impression grew in him; and the glamour faded out of hers as she was sharply reminded, looking at him, that he had not traversed the waste with her, that she had kept her vigils alone.  Yet it was all said and done, and there was no repentance in her.  She only gathered herself together, and fell back, as it were, upon her magnificent position.  As she drew her hand away, he dropped his face into the cover of his own, leaning his elbow on his knee, and there was a pulsing silence.  The instant prolonged itself.

“Are you praying?” Hilda asked, with much gentleness, almost a childlike note; and he shook his head.  There was another, instant’s pause, and she spoke again.

“Are you so grieved, then,” she said, “that this has come upon us?”

Again he held his eyes away from her, clasping his hands, and looking at the thing nearest to him, while at last blood from the heart of the natural man in him came up and stained his face, his forehead under the thin ruffling of colourless hair, his neck above the white band that was his badge of difference from other men.

“I—­fear—­I hardly understand,” he said.  The words fell cramped and singly, and his lip twitched.  “It—­it is impossible to think—­” He looked as if he dared not lift his head.

One would not say that Hilda hesitated, for there was no failing in the wings of her high confidence, but she looked at him in a brave silence.  Her glance had tender investigation in it; she stood on the brink of her words just long enough to ask whether they would hurt him.  Seeing that they would, she nevertheless plunged, but with infinite compassion and consideration.  She spoke like an agent of Fate, conscious and grieved.

“I understand,” she said simply.  “Sometimes, you know, we are quicker.  And you in your cell, how should you find out?  That is why I must tell you, because, though I am a woman, you are a priest.  Partly for that reason I may speak, partly because I love you, Stephen Arnold, better and more ardently than you can ever love me, or anybody, I think, except perhaps your God.  And I am tired of keeping silence.”