Words failed him, and he held out his arms. She recoiled, throwing up her hands with a gesture of loathing, and stood as if turned to stone, so strangely hard was a face where eyes kindled and burned with the pent hatred and scorn of long years of sore trial. "You had not sins enough to sink your soul without adding hypocrisy? A preacher! A priest! Cowardice, perjury, moral leprosy, skulking under a long cloak as black as what is left of your vile heart!" Each word fell like a red-hot flail, but he did not wince, and neither father nor mother heard the low wail from the cot where childish arms covered a face white with horror. "You think, you believe I intentionally and pre-meditatedly deserted you, and in your ignorance of facts you certainly had cause to despise me, but----" "Think--believe! As if it were possible to doubt the villainy planned! The crime you so carefully committed against a mere child, knowing she was a helpless victim, believing she could never redress her awful wrongs. As if you had set a trap and caught an innocent, happy bird, and then broken its wings and tossed it to screaming hawks! Coward--coward as you always were--how dare you face me?" "Nona, dear Nona--" He put out his hand appealingly, but she struck it aside with stinging force, and stepped backward. "Out of my sight, or I call the police." She pointed to the door. He turned, locked it, put the key in his pocket, and his eyes steadily met the challenge in hers. The banked, smouldering fires that flashed up must burn lower before he could plead. So they stood: he flushed, smiling, happy; she shaken by a tempest of rage that blanched her to a livid pallor and set all the glittering rings of hair quivering, as if innumerable golden serpents coiled and uncoiled around her trembling form. In the pause he lifted the hanging ends of the knotted cord. "Do you understand what this habit means?" "Don't I? A holy cloak to hide every sin that makes this world a hotter hell than even God could fashion--if God were possible. You drape it over the ten commandments, blotting them out, while you sing psalms, and rob the toiling poor, and ruin young lives, and murder innocent souls. Oh, yes, to my sorrow, I understand all it means!" "It means my consecration to celibacy when you fled from me, and I had exhausted all efforts to find you." "Celibacy! Celibacy! I needed no nunnery to help me keep clean and pure, but you ran behind monastery walls to protect yourself from retribution at a wronged woman's hands. Coward from first to last! When I fled from you? You must indeed be possessed of the devil to dare such language to me." "Nona, there has been some awful mistake----"