"To what end? You are not in the confessional. There may be details that would in some degree mitigate your guilt; but murder is a heinous sin, and I fear in your case it had been led up to by guilt almost as dark, the spoiling of a pure woman's soul. If the murder was not deliberate you cannot urge the same excuse for the sin of seduction, that sin which includes every abomination--hypocrisy, the falsehood that betrays a trusting fellow-creature, the calculating cruelty that sets a man's strength of will against a woman's yielding love." "No, no, no. Father, have you forgotten those two lost souls Dante saw, driven through the malignant air; they who had stained the earth with blood? Sorrow and sin had been theirs; but Francesca's lover was not a deliberate seducer, and even in that world of pain the love that linked those two who never could be parted more was no base or selfish passion. No man ever fought a harder battle than I fought for her sake. I loved her when we were boy and girl together, when she was a child, a lovely, innocent child, who gave me her heart in that happy morning of life, who had been shut out from all the affection that makes childhood beautiful, the caresses, the praise of an adoring mother, the love of father, brothers, sisters. She had known nothing better than the tepid kindness of a peevish old woman, and she gave her heart to me in the first joyous days of her life, I taught her what youth and happiness meant; and that spring-time of our lives was never forgotten. Vera was the romance of my boyhood. I carried her image in my heart for all the years in which we were strangers; and when Fate brought us together again our hearts went out to each other, as if the years had never parted us, as if she had been still as unconscious of passion as the child who clambered on my knee and flung her arms round my neck on the rocks at Disbrowe." "But with a certain difference," said the priest. "She was Mario Provana's wife." "I did not forget that. I told myself that I need never forget it. She was the centre of a selfish clan, who meant to run her for all she was worth. I knew to what account the Disbrowes would turn a millionaire cousin; and I took upon myself to stand between her and a herd of cold-hearted relations, who only valued her as a counter in the social game. Except Susan Amphlett, who is a fool, and Lady Okehampton, who is not much wiser, there was not one of the crew that had a spark of real regard for her." "And you thought your affection was pure enough to save her from all the pitfalls of Society."