as she had begun, while a frightened look invaded her liquid eyes.
"Misunderstood you," Hampstead iterated gently, but with firmness, "I understood you so well that except through an impersonal desire to be helpful, I should never have come here."
The very dignity and measured self-restraint of the minister's utterance robbed the woman of her usual admirable self-mastery. She cowered with timid face amid her pillows, as her mind leaped back to that night in the restaurant with Litschi, and the terrible lengths to which she had gone to shock this same big, dynamic, ardent Hampstead from his pursuit of her.
As if it were compromising himself to sit silent while he read her thoughts and heard again in his own ears that terrible speech, the minister went on to say sternly:
"You know that I shrank then, as from a loathsome thing, at the price you were willing to pay for your success. I must forewarn you that the memory does not seem less abhorrent now than the fact did then."
When Hampstead bit out these sentences with a fire of moral intensity burning in his eyes, the quivering figure upon the cushions shuddered and shrank.
"Oh, John!" a broken voice pleaded. "Did I ever, ever say those hateful words? Can you not conceive that they were false? That they were spoken with intent to deceive you, to drive you from me, to leave me free to make my way alone, unhampered, as I knew I must?"
The minister, his face still white and stern, his gray eyes beaming straight through widening lids, declared hotly: "No! I cannot conceive that a good woman would voluntarily smirch herself like that in the eyes of a man who loved her for any other single purpose than the one which she confessed, an ambition that was inordinate and—immoral. That thought was in your speech, and
