Save for the moving of the trees in the early winter air, there was only silence on the hill, where stood the little mission house, but a ghostly moon pushed its rays through the boughs of the trees, glistened on the panes of the church and silvered the interior.
The rows of dark pews shone up stiffly in the moonlit church, and a great white beam glimmered across the pulpit, shaped as a cross.
Azalea crawled on her hands and knees up one of the aisles of the church. She was moaning to herself as she made her painful journey along.
“—to touch his God!” she said, “for even the evil are forgiven.”
Now she was before the little pulpit, her weak hands upon it. She sighed at its contact, and a feeling of intense calm and rest seemed to flood her being, but she could not support herself against the pulpit structure, even upon her knees, so weak was she and so nauseating the pain in her head. Gradually she sank downward, lower and lower, till her face touched the floor. Then she spread out her arms, and lay very still, face downward.
It was past midnight when Richard Verley came back to the door of the little mission house. His old-time beggar protegee Gonji accompanied him. From the boy the minister had learned much—all, indeed—concerning his wife. He knew now what had befallen her so soon after the birth of her child: her homeless condition, her vain efforts to obtain work, her wanderings and terrible privations, and then the gossip of the town. People whispered that as a wraith she had returned to Sanyo and had passed as a shadow into the house of Matsuda Isami. The feelings of the husband can be imagined. Such was the temperament of Richard Verley that, even with the knowledge in his mind of her probable relations to the man Isami, there was no thought of blame for her in his heart. Indeed, the strongest emotion that swayed him was remorse of the deepest and bitterest. He should never have left her. He should have either forced her to accompany him or have remained in Japan with her.
His first impulse now was that of the man-brute, the desire to kill with his own hands the one who had injured him and his so terribly. But a calmer, higher instinct triumphed—the instinct of the man of strong spirituality to turn to that One who had never failed him in time of stress. Something seemed to force his footsteps toward his little house of prayer. So dazed and numb was the condition of his mind at this time, however, that he did not even notice when he came to the door of the church that it was no longer nailed to and boarded up.