yet I believe I am the unhappiest woman in the world."
There was almost a sob in her voice as she uttered the words, and the minister looked at her intently, with his face more gravely sympathetic than usual.
"I am trying to revive something," she hurried on, as if there was relief in thus hastily declaring herself, "trying to get back something. You alone can help me. My happiness, my very life, it seems to me, depends upon you. Will you come to see me this afternoon at the Hotel St. Albans, say at four?"
"I should like to," responded the minister frankly, his desire to help her growing rapidly; "but I have a funeral this afternoon."
"Then to-night," the actress urged, "after your sermon is done?"
As if anxious to forestall refusal, she gave him no chance to reply, but continued with some display of her old vivacity of spirit: "We will have a supper, as we did that night you came in after the play. Julie is still with me, and another maid, and a secretary, and sometimes my 'personal representative.' Oh, I have quite a retinue now! Do say you will come, even though it is an unseemly hour for a ministerial call," she pleaded, and again her eyes were eloquent.
But it was not the hour that made John hesitate. He felt himself immune from charges of indiscretion. He knew that despite his youthful thirty years, he seemed ages older than the oldest of his congregation, a man removed from every possibility of error; one whose simple, open life of day-by-day devotion to the good of all who sought him seemed in itself a sufficient armor-proof against mischance.
He came and went, in the upper and in the underworld, almost as he would; saw whom he would and where he would. Jails, theaters, hotels, questionable side en-
