At that, the other’s face flamed up, and she uttered a half-choked exclamation.  “Oh,” she cried—­“you’ve fallen in love with playing the martyr; it’s self-love!  You see yourself in the role!  No one on earth could make me believe you’re in love with this degraded imbecile—­all that’s left of the wreck of a vicious life!  It isn’t that!  It’s because you want to make a shining example of yourself; you want to get down on your knees and wash off the vileness from this befouled creature; you want—­”

“Madame!” Keredec interrupted tremendously, “you speak out of no knowledge!” He leaned toward her across the table, which shook under the weight of his arms.  “There is no vileness; no one who is clean remains befouled because of the things that are gone.”

“They do not?” She laughed hysterically, and for my part, I sighed in despair—­for there was no stopping him.

“They do not, indeed!  Do you know the relation of time to this little life of ours?  We have only the present moment; your consciousness of that is your existence.  Your knowledge of each present moment as it passes—­and it passes so swiftly that each word I speak now overlaps it—­ yet it is all we have.  For all the rest, for what has gone by and what is yet coming—­that has no real existence; it is all a dream.  It is not alive.  It is not!  It is—­nothing!  So the soul that stands clean and pure to-day is clean and pure—­and that is all there is to say about that soul!”

“But a soul with evil tendencies,” Ward began impatiently, “if one must meet you on your own ground—­”

“Ha! my dear sir, those evil tendencies would be in the soiling memories, and my boy is free from them.”

“He went toward all that was soiling before.  Surely you can’t pretend he may not take that direction again?”

“That,” returned the professor quickly, “is his to choose.  If this lady can be with him now, he will choose right.”

“So!” cried Miss Elizabeth, “you offer her the role of a guide, do you?  First she is to be his companion through a trial for bigamy in a French court, and, if he is acquitted, his nurse, teacher, and moral preceptor?” She turned swiftly to her cousin.  “That’s your conception of a woman’s mission?”

“I haven’t any mission,” Mrs. Harman answered quietly.  “I’ve never thought about missions; I only know I belong to him; that’s all I ever thought about it.  I don’t pretend to explain it, or make it seem reasonable.  And when I met him again, here, it was—­it was—­it was proved to me.”

“Proved?” echoed Miss Elizabeth incredulously.

“Yes; proved as certainly as the sun shining proves that it’s day.”

“Will you tell us?”

It was I who asked the question:  I spoke involuntarily, but she did not seem to think it strange that I should ask.