mastering him--bidding him resist the natural human impulses of love and
kindliness evoked by his wife's appeal.

_"God Himself has taken your punishment into His own Hands."_

Again he seemed to hear Catherine's accusing tones, and the fanatical
strain inbred in him answered like a boat to its helm. There must be no
more compromise, no longer any evasion of the issues of right and wrong.
He had sinned, and both he and the woman for whose sake he had defied
his own creed, and that of his fathers before him, must make atonement.
He drew himself up, and stood stiff and unbending beside the bed. In his
light-grey eyes there shone that same indomitable ardour of the zealot
which had shone in Catherine's.

"No," he said. "I am not angry that the child is a girl. I accept it as
a just retribution."

No man possessed of the ordinary instincts of common humanity would have
so greeted his wife just when she had emerged, spent and exhausted,
from woman's supreme conflict with death. But the fanatic loses sight of
normal values, and Hugh, obsessed by his newly conceived idea of atoning
for the sin of his marriage, was utterly oblivious of the enormity of
his conduct as viewed through unbiased eyes.

The woman who had just fought her way through the Valley of the Shadow
stared at him uncomprehendingly.

"Retribution?" she repeated blankly.

"For my marriage--our marriage."