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."
She was so direct, so unimpassioned, that half his distress turned to
astonishment, and he faced her as if a calm and reasoned hand had been
laid upon the confusion in him. Meeting his gaze, she unbarred a
flood-gate of happy tenderness in her eyes.
"Love!" he gasped in it, "I have nothing to do with that."
"Oh," she said, "you have everything to do with it."
Something leaped in him without asking his permission, assuring him that
he was a man, until then a placid theory with an unconscious basis. It
was therefore a blow to his saintship, or it would have been, but he
warded it off, flushed and trembling. It was as if he had been
ambuscaded. He had to hold himself from the ignominy of flight; he rose
to cut his way out, making an effort to strike with precision.
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