“What would you have? Would you rather him be with the being you think so unjust that you hate him all the week and openly insult him on Sunday?”

“You are a hard-hearted brute of a man—a devil to say such things about my boy! Oh, my God! To think that the very day he was taken ill, I struck him! Why did he let me do it? To think that he killed him on that very day, when he ought to have killed me!”

“If he had not taken him then, would you ever have been sorry you struck him?”

She burst into weeping mingled with swearing. The soul and the demon were so entirely united in her, so entirely of one mind, that there was no room for Wingfold’s prayers to get between them. He sat quiet, lifted up his heart, and waited. By and by there came a lull and the redeemable woman appeared, emerging from the smoke of the fury.

“Oh, my Harry!” she cried. “To take him from my very bosom. He will never love me again! God shall know what I think of it. No mother could but hate him after what he has done!”

“Apparently you don’t want the boy back in your arms again.”

“He’s dead!” she answered, drawing herself up and drying her eyes. “I can stand a good deal, but I won’t stand your toying with me! What’s gone is gone! The dead feel no arms. They go to the grave and return never more!”

“But you will die too.”

“What do you mean by that? As if I didn’t know I have to die one day or another. What’s that to Harry and me?”

“You think we’re all going to stop being and go out, like the clouds that are carried away and broken up by the wind?”

“I know nothing about it, and I don’t care. Nothing’s anything to me but Harry, and I shall never see my Harry again! Heaven! Bah! What’s heaven without Harry?”

“Nothing, of course! But don’t you ever think of seeing him again?”

“What’s the use? It’s all a mockery! What’s the good of meeting when we won’t be human beings anymore? If we’re nothing but ghosts—ugh! It’s all humbug! If he ever meant to give me back my Harry, why did he take him from me?”

“He gave you his brother at the same time, and you refused to love him. What if he took the one away until you should have learned to love the other?”

“I can’t love Peter. I won’t love him! He has his father to love him. He cares nothing for my love. I haven’t got any to give him! What are you doing there—laughing in your sleeve? Did you never see a woman cry?”

“I’ve seen many a woman cry, but never without my heart crying with her. You come to my church and behave so badly I can hardly help crying for you. It half choked me last Sunday to see you sitting there with that horrid book in your hand, and the words of Christ in your ears.”