"Let me finish," she protested. "I am even less humiliated. The thing required to charm you was a thing I did not possess!" "Beauty is a great possession," Hampstead smiled. "I have been and am sensible to it. I was sensible to your beauty to the last. The woman I love is beautiful." "The woman you love!" Marien’s whole manner changed. Her face took on the tigerish look. "There is some one else then? At least," she added reproachfully, "you might have spared me this." "It was necessary," the minister replied quietly, "if we were really to understand each other." The gravity of the man’s tone, as well as some subtle recovery within herself, checked the tigerish impulse. Swiftly it gave way to pain and humility again. "You—you are to marry?" she faltered weakly. "No," he replied, with ineffable sadness. "This—" and again that comprehensive gesture which he had used so frequently to indicate the catastrophe which had come upon him, "this has dashed that hope entirely!" The actress stood completely confounded. Within herself she wondered why she did not fly into a jealous passion. Surely she was changing; she felt half bewildered, half distrustful of her own moods in which she had believed so surely before. She was also completely staggered by this crowning revelation of the capacity of the man for sacrifice. Instead of the jealous passion, she felt a sisterly kind of sympathy; but it was only after a very considerable interval that Marien trusted herself to ask with trembling voice: "She is very—very beautiful—this—this woman whom you love?" The question was put very softly, meditatively almost. "To me, yes," replied the minister with emphasis. "I think you would say so too." "You were engaged?" "Not when I met you first; but there had been a bond of very close sympathy between us. After you were gone, I felt that I had never really loved you; and my heart fastened itself on her. I loved her and told her so. But I felt it my duty to tell her the truth about you. Manlike, I thought she would comprehend. Woman-like, she comprehended more than I thought. She believed me weak and uncertain. She loved me still, but with a pain of disappointment in her heart. She put my love upon a kind of probation. The probation has lasted five years. It was almost finished. After what the papers have published in the past few days, you can imagine that now all is over." "But you will write to her? You will see her? You will explain?" Marien questioned in self-forgetful eagerness. "Explain," he smiled sadly. "What a futility! What explanation could there be after what I had told her? You know a woman’s heart. More firmly than any other, she would be forced to an implicit belief in what the newspapers have falsely intimated concerning our relations in the past few weeks." "But I will go to her myself!" Marien exclaimed impetuously. "I will tell her the truth."