he demanded suddenly.

"Very much, Sir."

"Suffer martyrdom?"

"Perhaps I have done so."

"Would you suffer more? You undertake the conversion of a sinner
like myself?"

The flame of his eye caught hers in spite of herself. A little
flush came into her cheek.

"Tell me," he demanded imperiously, "on what terms?"

"You do not play the game. You would ask me to preach to you--but
you would come to see the revival, not to listen to grace. It
isn't playing the game."

"But you're seeking converts?"

"I would despise no man in the world so much as a hypocrite, a
turn-coat! You can't purchase faith in the market place, not any
more than--"

"Any more than you can purchase love? But I've been wanting not
the sermon, but the preacher. You! You! Yes, it is the truth. I
want nothing else in the world so much as you."

"I'd never care for a man who would admit that."

"There never was a woman in the world loved a man who did not."

"Oh, always I try to analyze these things," she went on
desperately, facing him, her eyes somber, her face aglow, her
attitude tense. "I try to look in my mirror and I demand of what I
see there. 'What are you?" I say. 'What is this that I see?'
Why, I can see that a woman might love her own beauty for itself.
Yes, I love my beauty. But I don't see how a woman could care for
a man who only cared for that,--what she saw in her mirror, don't
you know?"

"Any price, for just that!" he said grimly.

"No, no! You would not. Don't say that! I so much want you to be
bigger than that."

"The woman you see in your mirror would be cheap at any cost."

"But a man even like yourself. Sir, would be very cheap, if his
price was such as you say. No turncoat could win me--I'd love him
more on his own side yonder threefold wall, _with_ his convictions,
than on my side without them. I couldn't be bought cheap as that,
nor by a cheap man. I'd never love a man who held himself cheap.

"But then," she added, casting back at him one of his own earlier
speeches, "if you only thought as I did, what could not we two do
together--for the cause of those human blades of grass--so soon cut
down? Ah, life is so little, so short!"

"No! No! Stop!" he cried out. "Ah, now is the torture--now you
turn the wheel. I can not recant! I can not give up my
convictions, or my love, either one; and yet--I'm not sure I'm
going to have left either one. It's hell, that's what's left for
me.