“No.”

“No.  Not even for the sake of Him who, hanging on the tree, after all the bitterness of blows and whipping, and derision, and rudest gestures and taunts, even when the faintness of death was upon Him, cried to His Father to forgive their cruelty.  He asks you to forgive the man who wronged you, and you will not—­not even for Him!  Oh, Catherine, Catherine!”

“It is very easy to talk, Mr Walton,” she returned with forced but cool scorn.

“Tell me, then,” I said, “have you nothing to repent of?  Have you done no wrong in this same miserable matter?”

“I do not understand you, sir,” she said, freezingly, petulantly, not sure, perhaps, or unwilling to believe, that I meant what I did mean.

I was fully resolved to be plain with her now.

“Catherine Weir,” I said, “did not God give you a house to keep fair and pure for Him?  Did you keep it such?”

“He told me lies,” she cried fiercely, with a cry that seemed to pierce through the storm over our heads, up towards the everlasting justice.  “He lied, and I trusted.  For his sake I sinned, and he threw me from him.”

“You gave him what was not yours to give.  What right had you to cast your pearl before a swine?  But dare you say it was all for his sake you did it?  Was it all self-denial?  Was there no self-indulgence?”

She made a broken gesture of lifting her hands to her head, let them drop by her side, and said nothing.

“You knew you were doing wrong.  You felt it even more than he did.  For God made you with a more delicate sense of purity, with a shrinking from the temptation, with a womanly foreboding of disgrace, to help you to hold the cup of your honour steady, which yet you dropped on the ground.  Do not seek refuge in the cant about a woman’s weakness.  The strength of the woman is as needful to her womanhood as the strength of the man is to his manhood; and a woman is just as strong as she will be.  And now, instead of humbling yourself before your Father in heaven, whom you have wronged more even than your father on earth, you rage over your injuries and cherish hatred against him who wronged you.  But I will go yet further, and show you, in God’s name, that you wronged your seducer.  For you were his keeper, as he was yours.  What if he had found a noble-hearted girl who also trusted him entirely—­just until she knew she ought not to listen to him a moment longer? who, when his love showed itself less than human, caring but for itself, rose in the royalty of her maidenhood, and looked him in the face?  Would he not have been ashamed before her, and so before himself, seeing in the glass of her dignity his own contemptibleness?  But instead of such a woman he found you, who let him do as he would.  No redemption for him in you.  And now he walks the earth the worse for you, defiled by your spoil, glorying in his poor victory over you, despising all women for your sake, unrepentant and proud, ruining others the easier that he has already ruined you.”