Gillespie set his bucket of milk down beside the spring. “Nancy,” he said, “a woman cannot have two husbands. It's a crime against the State. It's a sin against God.” “But I haven't _got_ two husbands! What do you mean, David? Didn't I believe he was dead? Didn't you? Oh, David, what--Do you think I've done wrong? You let me do it!” “I don't think you've done wrong; but look out you don't do it. You _are_ doing it, now. I can't let you do it. I can't let you live in sin!” “In sin? Me?” “You. Every minute you live now with Laban you live in sin. Your first husband, that was dead, is alive. He can't claim you unless you allow it; but neither can your second husband, now. If you live on with Laban a day longer--an hour--a minute--you live in deadly sin. I thought of it all night but I had not thought it out till this minute when I first saw you sitting there and I knew how miserable you were, and my heart seemed to bleed at the sight of you.” “You may well say that, David,” the woman answered with a certain pride in the vastness of her calamity. “If it was another woman I couldn't bear to think of it. _Why_ does He do it? _Why_ does He set such traps for us?” “Nancy!” her brother called sternly. “Oh, yes, it's easy enough for you! But if Rachel was here, she'd see it different.” “Woman!” her brother said, “don't try to hide behind the dead in your sin.” “It's _no_ sin! I was as innocent as the babe unborn when I married Laban--as innocent as he was, poor boy, when he would _have_ me; and we all thought _he_ was dead. Oh, _why_ couldn't he have been dead?” “This is murder you have in your heart now, Nancy,” the old man said, with who knows what awful pleasure in his casuistry, so pitilessly unerring. “If the life of that wicked man could buy you safety in your sin you could wish it taken.” “Oh, oh, oh! What shall I do, what shall I do.” She wailed out the words with her head fallen forward on her knees, and her loose hair dripping over them. “Do? Go home, and bring your little one, and come to me. I will deal with Laban when he gets back tonight.” She started erect. “And let him think I've left him? And the neighbors, let them think we've quarreled, and I couldn't live with him?” “It won't matter what the world thinks,” Gillespie said, and he spoke of the small backwoods settlement as if it were some great center of opinion such as in great communities dispenses fame and infamy, and makes its judgments supremely dreaded. “Besides,” he faltered, “no one is knowing but ourselves to his coming back. It can seem as if _he_ left _you_.” “And I live such a lie as that? Is this _you_, David?” It was she who rose highest now, as literally she did, in standing on the stone where she had crouched, above the level of his footing. “I--I say it to spare you, Nancy. I don't wish it. But I wish to make it easy--or a little bit easier--something you can bear better.”