it. If we could only get away from this dreadful place!"
"It's a splendid place, Alice. It's the field of Armageddon for us. The Lord's battle is on. Would you have me branded as a deserter?"
"I don't know, Robert. I only know that I'm so miserable. If we could only live somewhere, in any little place, at peace, and let some one else do the fighting. You said, one day, that I shouldn't have married a minister. It hurt me then, but I've thought a good deal about it since,—and now I know it's true. I'm such a hopeless drag on you."
"You're a very great comfort to me, dear."
It was not true, and he knew in his heart that it was not true; but he could say no less and be a Christian gentleman.
"Thank you, Robert! And I've thought a good many times since then that if you only had a wife like Ruth Tracy, what a help and blessing she'd be to you."
This reflection of his own tenuous dream fell upon him so unexpectedly, struck him so gruesomely, that, for the moment, he could make no reply. And before he did find his tongue her thought was diverted into a new channel. She suddenly remembered something that she had heard at the door.
"Oh, Robert, what woman's eyes were they that Mr. Westgate wanted unsealed? Were they mine?"
"No, dear, they were not yours."
"Whose then?"
"Ruth Tracy's."
She backed away a little and looked at him inquiringly.
"Ruth—Tracy's? I don't understand. What did he mean?"
"Why, he appears to think that I have cast some sort of a hypnotic spell over Miss Tracy to induce her to go along with me in my fight."
"That's just what Jane Chichester says that so many
