ll he had won must be given up. Sin and shame
indeed it would be if in his person a sacrament of the Church should be
dragged through a divorce court. All other considerations paled before
this disgrace. He must resign his curacy, strip himself of the honorable
livery of heaven, obliterate his person and his name. It was a kind of
death.

After awhile he rose, drank some water, lifted the shade and let the
moonlight in. Then about that little room he walked with God through the
long night, telling Him his sorrow and perplexity. And there is a depth
in our own nature where the divine and human are one. That night Basil
Stanhope found it, and henceforward knew that the bitterness of death
was behind him, not before. "I made my nest too dear on earth," he
sighed, "and it has been swept bare--that is, that I may build in
heaven."

Now, the revelation of sorrow is the clearest of all revelations.
Stanhope understood that hour what he must do. No doubts weakened his
course. He went back to the house Dora called "hers," took away what he
valued, and while the servants were eating their breakfast and talking
over his marital troubles, he passed across its threshold for the last
time. He told no one where he was going; he dropped as silently and
dumbly out of the life that had known him as a stone dropped into
mid-ocean.

Ethel considered herself fortunate in being from home at the time this
disastrous culmination of Basil Stanhope's married life was reached. On
that same morning the Judge, accompanied by Ruth and herself, had gone
to Lenox to spend the holidays with some old friends, and she was quite
ignorant of the matter when she returned after the New Year. Bryce was
her first informant. He called specially to give her the news. He said
his sister had been too ill and too busy to write. He had no word of
sympathy for the unhappy pair. He spoke only of the anxiety it had
caused him. "He was now engaged," he said, "to Miss Caldwell, and she
was such an extremely proper, innocent lady, and a member of St. Jude's,
it had really been a trying time for her." Bryce also reminded Ethel
that he had been against Basil Stanhope from the first. "He had always
known how that marriage would end," and so on.

Ethel declined to give any opinion. "She must hear both sides," she
said. "Dora had been so reasonable lately, she had appeared happy."

"Oh, Dora is a little fox," he replied; "she doubles on herself always."

Ruth was proper