“You are perfectly right,” he replied.  “My profession and I are one, and this makes my case harder, for I have to fight two battles, one of love, and one of duty.  Think for a moment what a struggle it is!  I love you passionately.  I would like to say to you:  ’Take me on your own terms!  I will give you my life, as I will take yours.’  But how can I?  You are trembling on the verge of what I think destruction.  If I saw you tossing on the rapids yonder, at the edge of the fall, I could not be more eager to save you.  Yet think what self-control I have had to exercise, for though I have felt myself, for weeks, fighting a battle of life and death for a soul much dearer to me than my own, I have gone forward as though I felt no alarm.  I have never even spoken to you on the subject.  I stood by, believing so entirely in you that I dared let your own nature redeem itself.  But now you throw out a challenge, and I have no choice but to meet it.  I have got to fight for myself and my profession and you, at the same time.”

At last, then, the battle was fairly joined, and desperately as both the lovers had struggled against it, they looked their destiny in the face.  With all Esther’s love and sympathy for Hazard, and with all the subtle power which his presence had on her will, his last speech was unlucky.  Here was what she had feared!  She seemed to feel now, what she had only vaguely suspected before, the restraint which would be put upon her the moment she should submit to his will.  He had as good as avowed that nothing but the fear of losing her had kept him silent.  She fancied that the thunders of the church were already rolling over her head, and that her mind was already slowly shutting itself up under the checks of its new surroundings.  Hazard’s speech, too, was unlucky in another way.  If he had tried not to shock her by taking charge of her soul before she asked for his interference, she had herself made a superhuman effort not to shock him, and never once had she let drop a word that could offend his prejudices.  Since the truth must now come out, she was the less anxious to spare his pride because he claimed credit for respecting hers.

“Must you know why I have broken down and run away?” she said at last.  “Well!  I will tell you.  It was because, after a violent struggle with myself, I found I could not enter a church without a feeling of—­of hostility.  I can only be friendly by staying away from it.  I felt as though it were part of a different world.  You will be angry with me for saying it, but I never saw you conduct a service without feeling as though you were a priest in a Pagan temple, centuries apart from me.  At any moment I half expected to see you bring out a goat or a ram and sacrifice it on the high altar.  How could I, with such ideas, join you at communion?”

No wonder that Esther should have hesitated!  Her little speech was not meant in ridicule of Hazard, but it stung him to the quick.  He started up and walked across the room to the window, where he stood a moment trying to recover his composure.