Hampstead’s sad face lighted with sheer joy at her manner. It was such a relief that she had not come to commiserate him. His mood was extremely subtle. It irritated him to be pitied; it stung him to be doubted. He only wanted to be believed and to be encouraged by those who did believe him. This fragile blossom of a woman who, with all her gentleness and weakness, had yet in her breast the battling spirit of the martyrs of old, touched just the right note, as after an interval of sympathetic silence, she asked gently, with a voice full of the tenderest consideration, "Can you—can you see it to the end?" "To the end?" Hampstead lifted his brows gravely. "You mean—conviction?" "Yes," she answered with that simple directness which showed that she was blinking no phase of the question. "Is the issue big enough to require such a sacrifice?" "Oh, I think it is too improbable it could go to that length," Hampstead answered thoughtfully. "But it might! Is it worth it?" Mrs. Burbeck persisted. The calm sincerity of her manner poised the question like a lance aimed at his heart. Hampstead hesitated. He really had not thought as far as this, any farther in fact than the hateful smudge of the thumb print and the picture in the Gallery of Rogues. But now, with her considerately calculating glances upon him, he did think that far, weighing all his hopes, his work, his position at the head of All People’s, his priceless liberty, his fathomless love for Bessie, against the pledged word of a priest to a weak and penitent thief, whose soul at this moment trembled on the brink, suspended alone by the spectacle of the integrity of the confessor to his vow. He weighed his duty to this thief now somewhat as five years before he had weighed his duty to Dick and Tayna against the supreme ambition of his life. The stakes then, on both sides, large as they had seemed, were infinitely smaller than the values at issue now. Looking back, John knew that then he had not only made the right decision, but the best decision for himself. He thought that he was humbling himself; but instead he had exalted himself. But now the lines were not so sharply drawn. He was renouncing his very position and power to do his duty. "Is it?" Mrs. Burbeck half-looked and half-breathed this gentle reminder that she had asked her pastor a question. "I believe," said the minister, revealing frankly the trend of his thought, "that the nearest duty is the greatest duty; that the man who spares himself for some great task will never come to a great task. I hold that a man ought to be true in any relation of life; and when the issue is drawn between one duty and another, he should try to determine calmly which is the highest duty and be true to that. I shall try to be that in this case—even to conviction!" The sheen upon the face of the woman as she listened was as great as the glow upon the face of the man as he spoke.