Cornelia looked down, for there was a certain light in her eyes which had no right to be there.  When she thought it was subdued, she raised them again.

“Shouldn’t you hate him always afterward?  Shouldn’t you want to kill him?” demanded she, in a low voice.

“I should want to kill only the memory of his unworthiness,” replied Sophie, her voice rising and clearing, while she regarded her sister with a full, bright glance.  “As to hating him—­I cannot hate any one I have loved, Neelie.”  She raised herself up as she spoke, and sat erect.

“Well, you’re a strange girl!” said Cornelia, who was a little confused.  “I don’t see how you can ever be either happy or unhappy.  Nothing human seems to have any hold upon you.”

“I’m very human,” returned Sophie, shaking her head.  “There are some things, I think, would soon drive me out of the world, if God wore to send them to me.”

The idea of death, when brought home to Cornelia, never failed to affect her.  If she had been planning the destruction of an enemy, she would have wept bitterly at the sight of that enemy’s dead body; nay, even at a vivid account of his death.  Sophie’s words brought tears to her eyes at once, and a quaver into her voice.

“Don’t—­please don’t talk that way, dear; it isn’t so easy to die as you think, I’m sure.  The idea of dying because anybody was wicked!  It’s only because you’ve been ill, and have got into the habit of expecting to die, that you have such ideas—­isn’t it? don’t you think so?  You’ll stop feeling so as soon as you’re well again—­won’t you?”

“Perhaps,” said Sophie, with, it may be, a particle of satire in her smile.

They now got up from the rock and began to descend toward the Parsonage.  Sophie stepped with a quick but careful precision, never slipping or missing her footing.  Cornelia made short rushes, and daring jumps, often coining near to fall.  Her mind was a Babel of new thoughts; or rather one idea spoke with many tongues, and made much disturbance.

The greatest crimes are often perpetrated by those who, in their own phrase, follow the lead of the moment, and let things take their course.  Things never take their own course, in a certain sense; what we do, and say, and think, creates circumstances and shapes results.  There seems always to be a choice of paths.  We profess—­and believe—­that we are neutral; that we surrender ourselves to the chance of the current.  But let an evil hope—­a dangerous wish—­once enter our minds:  something we venture only half to hint to ourselves in the non-committal whispers of a craven, unacknowledged longing-working secretly within us, it will act upon our course as a rudder, which, hidden beneath the water, steers the vessel inevitably toward a certain goal.  Perhaps, when the current has become too swift, and the rudder, clamped in one fatal position, cannot be turned, we may realize, and recoil; but now, indeed, we follow the lead of the moment; now, beyond a doubt, we let things take their course:  we are hurried on irresistibly; that which we dared not openly to name, or fairly to face, now looms awfully above us—­an irrevocable, accomplished fact.