vicissitudes of years, to absence and to a foul slander which my own lips breathed against myself! But I did not kill it! I did not kill it!"
"At any rate, it is dead," replied the man, his voice as sadly sympathetic as it was coolly decisive.
"But I will make it live again," the woman exclaimed desperately. "I love you, John! Oh, God, how I love you!"
She endeavored to reach his neck with her arms, but the minister stepped back, and she stood wringing them emptily, a look in her eyes as if she implored him to understand.
But the minister was still unresponsive.
"It was a queer way for love to act," he protested, and again with that comprehensive gesture which called accusing notice to the ruin pulled down upon him.
"But will you not understand?" she pleaded. "It was the last desperate resource of love. I could not reach the real you. I tried for weeks. I endured insufferable associations. I assumed distasteful interests—all to put myself in your company; to keep you in mine; to create those proximities, those environments and situations in which love grows naturally. Again and again I thought that love was springing up. But I was disappointed. You did not respond. What I thought at first was response was only sympathy. To you I was no longer a woman. I was a subject in spiritual pathology.
"When I saw this, first it irritated, then maddened me. I knew that you were not yourself, that your environment had insulated you. That you were so interested in the part which you were playing,—so absorbed by the duty of being a public idol, that you could not be yourself, the man, the flesh, the heart, I know you are.
"In desperation I resolved to strip you, to hurl you down, to rob you of the public regard, of your church,
