He repulsed her with a raging force, still staring silently over and beyond her. It seemed to him that some ghastly sacristan was lighting up a sacrificial altar in his memory. Candle by candle it flamed into dreadful illumination, revealing the abominations that in the darkness he had been only innocently condoning. He thought he understood now what had impelled her to that strange haunting of the neighbourhood of the tree; what remorse had driven her to the prayers and prostrations that had aroused the curiosity of the village; why, panic-stricken under that threat of search, she had wrought in a moment, of her imagination, a fable that should serve her secret evermore for an ark double-cased. He recalled, in the ghastly light of a new interpretation, almost the last words she had spoken to him in a time that he had thought was dead and forgotten: “Oh, my God, not so to stultify all I have suffered and done for thy sake!” For his sake--for his sake! Was he so vile as this, then--he who had dared in dreams to mate with a purity like an angel’s--that the incense of any noisome sacrifice, if only offered up to himself, he must be held to find grateful! He broke, without meaning it, into a horrible laugh. “Did she--the mother--not promise,” he shrieked, “to restore the little brother to you--the poor little murdered wretch! She has kept to her word. And you--you? Don’t forget you are sworn under damnation to dedicate yourself, a maid, to her service! Can you do it? God in heaven, it is not your fault if you can!” She fell before him, as he spurned her, writhing and moaning amongst the sodden grass. “Won’t you listen to me--oh, won’t you listen? If you would only kill me, and not speak!” He stood immediately rigid as justice’s own sentry. “Yes, I will listen,” he said, “and you shall condemn yourself.” She crept a thought nearer and, feeling him keep aloof, sat bowed upon the ground, her fingers locked together in her lap. “I will tell you the truth,” she said, low and broken. “After that first time he, my brother, was changed. He became, when you were gone, a little devil, insulting and defying me. It was terrible--his precocity. He held over my head ever a threat--monsieur, it was that he would make exposure of the _liaison_ between his sister and the Englishman.” Ned uttered an exclamation. She entreated him with raised hands. “Ah! it is not always the truth one fears. One day in the woods--oh, my God, monsieur, hide me!--in the woods--what was I saying! Mother of God! it was here--we quarrelled, and I was desperate. He ran to escape me, climbed the great branch that stooped to the grass. He stood high up, reviling me. I made as if to fling a stone: he threw up his arm, stumbled, and disappeared.” She crept towards him again, yet another agonised appeal for the tiniest assurance that he had ceased to loathe her. At least this time he stood his ground.