Then, after a long stillness, I crept closer to him, so that my head bowed against his arm, and opened the very depths to him. “I don’t think any woman ought to say this to any man,” I began from very far down in my throat, “but you are a preacher, and that makes a difference, and you won’t mind. I am disrespectful and ungrateful to Aunt Grace about it when she is trying her level best to do it to me, but--but I ought to get married. There are lots of wonderful women all over the world who are doing gloriously without husbands, and living happily forever after; but I’m not one. Some women have such frivolous spirits that nothing but a good, firm husband and an enormous family of children can ever chasten them. I’m one. I’ve always thought that he’d find me some day long before I was ready for him--or them; but now I’m afraid he’ll never come. I know he won’t.” I clung to his strong fingers desperately. “I think he will,” he answered as he kindly, but firmly, possessed himself of his own hand and coat-sleeve, but in such a way as not to hurt my feelings. “I seem to feel that he is well on the road, though fighting hard,” he added in what sounded like mild exasperation or desperation, I couldn’t tell which. “No,” I answered, with pitiful sadness and real conviction--“no; I am not worthy of him, and he won’t come. It is too late. God and you have just taught me this dreadful night what a good woman really is, and now I will have to be so busy trying all the rest of my life to be one that I won’t have time to look for--that is, he won’t find me. I don’t want anything but a good one, and if I’m being so good as all that, how’ll I let him know I want him?” “Maybe he’ll get a revelation,” answered Gabriel in a low and controlled voice that seemed to come from the very fastnesses of something within him. And as he spoke I felt something warm and sweet and terrible stealing over me; but I plunged forward in my confession, past the episode of the duke, my traitorous flight from home, and up to the arrival at Stivers’s, and the cowardly taking of refuge under the patchwork quilt. “I misunderstood, and thought from the way the men talked that you were going to kill Bill, and I was too much of a coward to run out and find him in the dark and warn him. You see, I lay still and let Bill be killed, whether you did it or not; and so I murdered him, even if he is alive,” I deduced miserably. “Dudley was wise to fear the precipitation of the logical part of the solution,” Gabriel remarked so quietly that it seemed as if he preferred that I shouldn’t hear him.