"Woman!" her brother said, "don't try to hide behind the dead in your sin."

"It's _no_ sin! I was as innocent as the babe unborn when I married
Laban--as innocent as he was, poor boy, when he would _have_ me; and
we all thought _he_ was dead. Oh, _why_ couldn't he have been
dead?"

"This is murder you have in your heart now, Nancy," the old man said,
with who knows what awful pleasure in his casuistry, so pitilessly
unerring. "If the life of that wicked man could buy you safety in your sin
you could wish it taken."

"Oh, oh, oh! What shall I do, what shall I do." She wailed out the words
with her head fallen forward on her knees, and her loose hair dripping
over them.

"Do? Go home, and bring your little one, and come to me. I will deal with
Laban when he gets back tonight."

She started erect. "And let him think I've left him? And the neighbors,
let them think we've quarreled, and I couldn't live with him?"

"It won't matter what the world thinks," Gillespie said, and he spoke of
the small backwoods settlement as if it were some great center of opinion
such as in great communities dispenses fame and infamy, and makes its
judgments supremely dreaded. "Besides," he faltered, "no one is knowing
but ourselves to his coming back. It can seem as if _he_ left
_you_."

"And I live such a lie as that? Is this _you_, David?"