infinite,
could resist an attack like this? What woman with a soul could see
before her the most powerful public man of her time, appealing--with
a face furrowed by anxieties, and a voice vibrating with only
half-suppressed affection--to her for counsel and sympathy, without
yielding some response? and what woman could have helped bowing her head
to that rebuke of her over-confident judgment, coming as it did from one
who in the same breath appealed to that judgment as final? Ratcliffe,
too, had a curious instinct for human weaknesses. No magnetic needle
was ever truer than his finger when he touched the vulnerable spot in
an opponent's mind. Mrs. Lee was not to be reached by an appeal to
religious sentiment, to ambition, or to affection.

Any such appeal would have fallen flat on her ears and destroyed its own
hopes. But she was a woman to the very last drop of her blood. She
could not be induced to love Ratcliffe, but she might be deluded into
sacrificing herself for him. She atoned for want of devotion to God, by
devotion to man.

She had a woman's natural tendency towards asceticism, self-extinction,
self-abnegation. All through life she had made painful efforts to
understand and follow out her duty. Ratcliffe knew her weak point when
he attacked her from this side. Like all great orators and advocates, he
was an actor; the more effective because of a certain dignified air that
forbade familiarity.

He had appealed to her sympathy, her sense of right and of duty, to her
courage, her loyalty, her whole higher nature; and while he made this
appeal he felt more than half convinced that he was all he pretended to
be, and that he really had a right to her devotion. What wonder that she
in her turn was more than half inclined to admit that right. She knew
him now better than Carrington or Jacobi knew him. Surely a man who
spoke as he spoke, had noble instincts and lofty aims? Was not his
career a thousand times more important than hers? If he, in his
isolation and his cares, needed her assistance, had she an excuse for
refusing it? What was there in her aimless and useless life which made
it so precious that she could not afford to fling it into the gutter, if
need be, on the bare chance of enriching some fuller existence?

Chapter VIII

OF all titles ever assumed by prince or potentate, the proudest is that
of the Roman pontiffs: "Servus servorum Dei"--"Servant of the servants
of God."

In former days it was