“For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh.

“Wherefore, they are no more twain, but one flesh.  What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”

“Is that the way you will make a home and give it to me,—­before them all?” she said.

He forgot the sophistries he might have used; he forgot to say that it was to leave father and mother and join himself to her, that he had purposed; he forgot to tell her again that he would be true to her all his life, and that nothing should put them asunder.  He did not take up those words, as men have done, and say that God had joined their hearts together and made them in his sight one.  The angels were beside him, in his turn, as he read.  Those sentences of the Christ, shining up at him from the page, were like the look turned back upon Peter, showing him his sin.

“One flesh:”  to be seen and known as one.  To have one body of living; to be outwardly joined before the face of men.  None to set them asunder, or hold them separate by thought, or accident, or misunderstanding.  This was the sacred acknowledgment of man and wife, and he knew that he had not meant to make it.

As he stood there, silent, she knew it too.  She knew that she should not have been his wife before anybody.

Her young face grew paler, and turned stern.

His flushed:  a slow, burning, relentless flush, that betrayed him, marking him like Cain.  He lowered his eyes in the heat of it, and stood so before the child.

She looked steadfastly at him for one instant; then she shut the book, and turned away, delivering him from the condemning light of her presence.

“No:  I will not go to that little home with you,” she said with a grief and scorn mingled in her voice, as they might have been in the voice of an angel.

When she looked round again, he was gone.  Their ways had parted.

An hour later, Bel Bree turned the key outside her door, and with a little leather bag in her hand, saying not a word to any one, went down into the street.

Across the Common, and over the great hill, she walked straight to Greenley Street, and to Miss Desire.

CHAPTER XXV.

BEL BREE’S CRUSADE:  THE PREACHING.

Desire Ledwith had a great many secrets to keep.  Everybody came and told her one.

All these girls whom she knew, had histories; troubles, perplexities, wrongs, temptations,—­greater or less.  Gradually, they all confessed to her.  The wrong side of the world’s patchwork looked ugly to her, sometimes.

Now, here came Bel Bree; with her story, and her little leather bag; her homelessness, her friendlessness.  No, not that; for Desire Ledwith herself contradicted it; even Mrs. Pimminy and Miss Smalley were a great deal better than nothing.  Not friendlessness, then, exactly; but belonglessness.