ed, and to
accept it as literally, unreservedly, finally forbidding the marriage of
a divorced woman. He had insisted on that plain interpretation of plain
words in terms which had made his congregation tremble. And now he stood
alone in the secrecy of his own chamber self-convicted of the deadly sin
which he had denounced--he stood, as he had told the wicked among his
hearers that they would stand at the Last Day, before the Judgment Seat.

He was unconscious of the lapse of time; he never knew whether it was
many minutes or few before the door of his room was suddenly and softly
opened. It did open, and his wife came in.

In her white dress, with a white shawl thrown over her shoulders; her
dark hair, so neat and glossy at other times, hanging tangled about her
colorless cheeks, and heightening the glassy brightness of terror in
her eyes--so he saw her; the woman put away from her husband--the woman
whose love had made his life happy and had stained his soul with a
deadly sin.

She came on to within a few paces of him without a word or a tear, or
a shadow of change passing over the dreadful rigidity of her face. She
looked at him with a strange look; she pointed to the newspaper crumpled
in his hand with a strange gesture; she spoke to him in a strange voice.

"You know it!" she said.

His eyes met hers--she shrank from them--turned--and laid her arms and
her head heavily against the wall.

"Oh, Alfred," she said, "I was so lonely in the world, and I was so fond
of you!"

The woman's delicacy, the woman's trembling tenderness welled up from
her heart, and touched her voice with a tone of its old sweetness as she
murmured those simple words.

She said no more. Her confession of her fault, her appeal to their past
love for pardon, were both poured forth in that one sentence. She left
it to his own heart to tell him the rest. How anxiously her vigilant
love had followed his every word and treasured up his every opinion in
the days when they first met; how weakly and falsely, and yet with how
true an affection for him, she had shrunk from the disclosure which she
knew but too well would have separated them even at the church door;
how desperately she had fought against the coming discovery which
threatened to tear her from the bosom she clung to, and to cast her out
into the world with the shadow of her own shame to darken her life to
the end--all this she left him to feel; for the moment which might
part them f