“Tell him, Mrs. Disney! Can you forget that I am a priest--for whom the sinner’s confession is sacred? Do you think I have never talked with the tempted and the sorrowing before to-day? Do you think that grief such as yours can be an unknown experience to a man who has worked in a crowded London parish for nearly twenty years? I wanted to know the worst, so that I might be able to advise and to console you. If I have questioned you to-day, it has been as a priest has the right to question; and this place where you and I have met to-day is in my sight as sacred as the confessional. You need have no fear that I shall tell your husband the secret of your sorrow. All I will do is to help you to find strength to tell him yourself.” “Oh no, no, no!” she cried piteously. “Never! never! I can die, I am prepared to die; but I can never tell him--I cannot, I dare not.” “Yet you could dare to die with a lie upon your lips--you who are ready to meet your Judge--you whose whole life is a lie--you who have cheated and betrayed the best of men. Oh, Mrs. Disney, reflect what this thing is which you are doing; reflect what kind of sin it is you are committing. If, as your own sorrowing words acknowledge, you have been a false wife--a false wife to the best and truest of husbands, can you dare to act out that falsehood to the last, to die with that guilty secret locked in your heart, from him who has a right to know,--and who alone upon earth has a right to pardon.” “Oh, how cruel you are!” she said, lifting up her streaming eyes to his earnest, inflexible face. “Is it a Christian’s part to be so cruel, to break the bruised reed, to crush anything so weak and wretched as I am? Is not repentance enough? I have spent long nights in penitence and tears, long days in dull aching remorse. I would have given all my future life to atone for one dreadful hour--one unpremeditated yielding to temptation. I _have_ given my life--for my secret has killed me. What more can man or God demand of me? What more can I do to win forgiveness?” “Only this--tell your husband the truth--however painful, however humiliating the confession. That will be your best atonement. That is the sacrifice which will help to reconcile you with your God. You cannot hope for God’s love and pardon hereafter, if you live and die as a hypocrite here. God’s saints were some of them steeped in the darkness of guilt before they became the children of light--but there was not one of them who shrank from the confession of his sins.” “You are a man,” sobbed Isola. “You do not know what it is for a woman to confess that she is unworthy of her husband’s love. You do not know. It is not possible for a man to know the meaning of shame.”