ted by it. Her views changed--Victor Warren's did not. She
began to realize that some other woman might have an influence over his
life--she had none, simply because he did not love her. And love is not
a thing we can compel."

"You are making it very hard for me, Mrs. Constable," he said.
"You are now advocating an individualism with which the Church can have
no sympathy. Christianity teaches us that life is probationary, and if
we seek to avoid the trials sent us, instead of overcoming them, we find
ourselves farther than ever from any solution. We have to stand by our
mistakes. If marriage is to be a mere trial of compatibility, why go
through a ceremony than which there is none more binding in human and
divine institutions? One either believes in it, or one does not. And,
if belief be lacking, the state provides for the legalization of
marriages."

"Oh!" she exclaimed.

"If persons wish to be married in church in these days merely because it
is respectable, if such be their only reason, they are committing a great
wrong. They are taking an oath before God with reservations, knowing
that public opinion will release them if the marriage does not fulfil
their expectations."

For a moment she gazed at him with parted lips, and pressing her
handkerchief to her eyes began silently to cry. The sudden spectacle,
in this condition, of a self-controlled woman of the world was infinitely
distressing to Hodder, whose sympathies were even more sensitive than
(in her attempt to play upon them) she had suspected. . . She was
aware that he had got to his feet, and was standing beside her, speaking
with an oddly penetrating tenderness.

"I did not mean to be harsh," he said, "and it is not that I do not
understand how you feel. You have made my duty peculiarly difficult."

She raised up to him a face from which the mask had fallen, from which
the illusory look of youth had fled. He turned away. . . And
presently she began to speak again; in disconnected sentences.

"I so want her to be happy--I cannot think, I will not think that she has
wrecked her life--it would be too unjust, too cruel. You cannot know
what it is to be a woman!"

Before this cry he was silent.

"I don't ask anything of God except that she shall have a chance, and it
seems to me that he is making the world better--less harsh for women."

He did not reply. And presently she looked up at him again, steadfastly
now, searchingly. The barriers of the conven