For a while she stood considering. "Brother," she said, "I will be plain with you. Since this marriage was forced upon me, I have tried--and, please God, I will go on trying--to redeem my conduct. But of my soul I scarcely think at all." "Hetty, this is monstrous." "I pray," she went on, "for help to be good. With tears I pray for it, and all day long I am trying to be good and do my duty. As for my soul, sometimes I wake and see the need to be anxious for it, and resolve to think of it anxiously: but when the morning comes, I have no time--the day is too full. And sometimes I grow rebellious and vow that it is no affair of mine: let them answer for it who took it in charge and drove me to tread this path. And sometimes I tell myself that once I had a soul, and it was sinful; but that God was merciful and destroyed it, with its record, when He destroyed my baby. The doctor swore to me that it never drew a separate breath; no, not one. Tell me, Jack! A child that has never breathed can know neither heaven nor hell--questions of baptism do not touch it-- it goes out of darkness into darkness and is annihilated. Is that not so? So I assure myself, and sometimes I think that by the same stroke God wiped out the immortal part of me with its sins, that my body and brain go on living, but that the soul of your Hetty will never come up for judgment, for it has ceased to be." "Monstrous!" "You understand," she went on wearily, "that this is but one of my thoughts. My heart denies it whenever I long to creep back to Wroote and listen to the old voices and be a child once more. But I am showing you what is the truth--that upon one plea or another I put my soul aside and excuse myself from troubling about it." "Sadder hearing there could not be. You have an imperishable soul, and owe it a care which should come before your duty even to your husband." "Ah, Jack, you may be a very great man: but you do not understand women! I wonder if you ever will? For now you do not even begin to understand." He would have answered in hot anger, but a noise on the path prevented him. Four sportsmen came wending homeward in the dusk, shouldering their guns and laughing boisterously. In the loudest of the guffaws he recognised the voice of Dick Ellison. "Hallo!" The leader pulled himself up with a chuckle. "Here's pretty goings-on--the little parson colloguing with a wench! Dick, Dick, aren't you ashamed of your relatives?" "Ashamed of them long ago," stuttered Dick, lurching forward. He had been making free with the flask all day. "Who is it?" he demanded. "Come, my lass--no need to be shy with me! Let's have a look at your pretty face." The fellow plucked at Hetty's hood. John gripped his arm, was flung off with an indecent oath, and gripped him again. "This lady, sir, is my sister."