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 by Heaven"—he shook an accusing finger at her—"I believe it was in your purpose!" The woman cowered for a moment longer before Hampstead’s gaze, then a single dry sob broke from her, while one hand covered her eyes, and the other stretched gropingly to him, across the pillows. "I had the purpose," she admitted haltingly. "I confess it. Is it not pitiful?" and the lily hand which had felt its way so pleadingly across the embroidered cushions opened and closed its fingers on nothing, with a movement that was convulsive and appealing beyond words. "Pitiful," the minister groaned. "My God, it is tragic!" "Yes," she went on presently, in a calmer voice that was more resigned and sadly reminiscent: "I purposed it." And there she stopped. Her tone was as dry as ashes. This man had surprised her by revealing a startling amount of moral force, which had quickly and easily broken down her coolly conceived purpose to make him believe that his sense of hearing had played him false that night in the restaurant. She had, however, confessed only to what she knew he knew; but the roused conscience of the preacher of righteousness detected this and was not to be evaded. He proposed to confront this woman with her sin. "You confess only to the purpose?" John demanded accusingly.