tacle of you bearing uncomplainingly upon your back the burden of my guilt before this whole community sets something burning in me like a fire. It has given me courage to come here. Sometimes in the last few hours I have almost had the courage to come out and tell the truth, to denounce this devilish woman for what she is, and to take my guilt upon myself."
For a moment Rollie's eyes opened till a ring of white appeared about the iris, and he shifted his position dizzily.
"But," exclaimed the minister with sudden apprehension and an outburst of great earnestness, "you must not. You must consider your mother. I command you to consider her above everything else! I should forbid you to speak for her sake, if nothing else were involved. I do want you to become brave enough to take this guilt upon yourself, if circumstances permit it; but, they do not permit. Besides," and the minister shook his head sadly, "even that would now be powerless to relieve me from these awful consequences. I might be proved spotlessly innocent of the charge of theft, and yet my reputation would still be hopelessly ruined. It has cost me all, Rollie—all!"
The minister and the penitent, the innocent and the guilty, drew together for the moment linked by that bond of sympathy which invariably exists when one man suffers willingly in the cause of another, and is heightened when the sufferer winces under the pain.
"Even," the minister labored on, "even that hope of Her, of which I told you the other day, has been torn from me."
Rollie's face turned a more ghastly white.
"That?" he murmured huskily.
"That!" assented the minister, with a grave, downward bend of the head.
"It is too much," groaned the young man in real agony
