"Where are the limits there?"
"There are other duties in life besides that to a wife who has betrayed
her husband," she said, steadily. "You ask of William what he has not
the strength to give. His life was wrecked, and he has pieced it
together again. And now he has given it to his country. That poor,
guilty child has no claim upon it."
"But understand," said Ashe, interposing, with an energy that seemed to
express the whole man--"while I live,
everything--short of what you
ask--that can be done to protect or ease her, shall be done. Tell her
that."
His features worked painfully. The Dean took up his hat and stick.
"And may I tell her, too," he said, pausing--"that you forgive her?"
Ashe hesitated.
"I do not believe," he said, at last, "that she would attach any more
meaning to that word than I do. She would think it unreal. What's done
is done."
The Dean's heart leaped up in the typical Christian challenge to the
fatal and the irrevocable. While life lasts the lost sheep can always be
sought and found; and love, the mystical wine, can always be poured into
the wounds of the soul, healing and recreating! But he said no more.
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