"
"No; not for you," was the slow reply.
She noticed his hesitation, and said: "Speak. I know that there is
sorrow on him. Someone--someone--he loved?"
"Someone he loved," was the reply.
"And she died?" The priest bowed his head.
"She was his wife--Shon's wife?" and Mary Callen could not hide from her
words the hurt she felt.
"I married her to him, but yet she was not his wife." There was a keen
distress in the girl's voice. "Father, tell me, tell me what you mean."
"Hush, and I will tell you all. He married her, thinking, and she
thinking, that she was a widowed woman. But her husband came back.
A terrible thing happened. The woman believing, at a painful time, that
he who came back was about to take Shon's life, fired at him, and wounded
him, and then killed herself."
Mary Callen raised herself upon her elbow, and looked at the priest in
piteous bewilderment. "It is dreadful," she said. . . . "Poor woman!
. . . And he had forgotten--forgotten me. I was dead to him, and am
dead to him now. There's nothing left but to draw the cold sheet of the
grave over me. Better for me if I had never come--if I had never come,
and instead were lyin' by his father and mother beneath the rowan."
The priest took her wrist firmly in his. "These are not brave nor
Christian words, from a brave and Christian girl.
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