It is not I who have sinned against her--"
"Sinned against her! Who has sinned against her? Do you mean me?"
"No, not you. You also have been sinned against. I also." He sighed
wearily. "When I look about me, it seems as though not one of us has
not in turn sinned and been sinned against. It is an endless chain of
the wrong we do one another."
She laughed, and for the first time there rang in her voice a note of
the old harshness.
"Look at me, John. There is no turn and turn about with me. From the
beginning I have tricked and lied and fought my way through life. I
didn't care whom I hurt so long as I got through. I sinned. Who has
sinned against me?"
"One person at least," he answered significantly.
She caught her breath, and the hand that passed hastily across her
forehead trembled.
"Even if it were true what you say," she said, half inaudibly, "it
does not alter the fact that we must atone for what has been done."
"It is the justice of the world," he assented. "We must make good the
harm we do and the harm that has been done us." He threw back his
shoulders with a movement of energetic protest. "Do not let us waste
time talking. We can not help each other. All I ask is--do not forget
my message."
She looked at him, strangely moved.
"You talk as though you were going to die to-night," she said.
"I talk as a man does whom death has already tapped on the shoulder
more than once of late," he answered, with grim humor.
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