no patience with--There, there! I didn't
mean to lose my temper, but bless my soul, this is the worst thing I ever
knew. See here, Helen, if the man is so determined, you'll have to change
your views, or go back to your old views, I mean,--I don't know what you
do believe,--that's all there is about it."

Helen was unfolding John's letter, and she looked up at her uncle with a
fleeting smile. "Change my views so that I can go back? Do you think that
would satisfy John? Do you think I could? Why, uncle Archie, do you
believe in eternal damnation? I know you pray to be delivered from it in
the Litany, but do you believe in it?"

"That has nothing to do with the question, Helen," he answered, frowning,
"and of course I believe that the consequences of sin are eternal."

"You know that is not what the prayer means," she insisted; "you have
to put your private interpretation upon it. Well, it is my private
interpretation which John thinks is sin, and sin which will receive what
it denies."

"Well, you must believe it, then," the rector said, striking his fist on
the arm of his chair; "it is the wife's place to yield; and while I
acknowledge it is all folly, you must give in."

"You mean," she said, "that I must say I believe it. Can I change a
belief? You know I cannot, uncle Archie. And when you hear what John
says, you will see I must be true, no matter where truth leads me."

Helen knew every word of that letter by heart. She had read it while she
drove towards the depot, and when she dismissed the carriage it was with
a vague idea of flying to Lockhaven, and brushing all this cobweb of
unreason away, and claiming her right to take her place at her husband's
side. But as she sat in the station, waiting, every sentence of the
letter began to burn into her heart, and she slowly realized that she
could not go back. The long day passed, and the people, coming and going,
looked curiously at her; one kindly woman, seeing the agony in her white
face, came up and asked her if she were ill, and could she help her?
Helen stared at her like a person in a dream, and shook her head. Then,
in a numb sort of way, she began to understand that she must go back to
Ashurst. She did not notice that it had begun to rain, or think of a
carriage, but plodded, half blind and dazed, over the country road to her
old home, sometimes sitting down, not so much to rest as to take the
letter from its envelope again and read it.

She looked at it