"But she did it so wantonly, so irresponsibly; what reparation does she propose?" "To immediately make a public confession that her charge against me was utterly false," replied John, strangely moved to speak defensively for Marien. "She will do that?" exclaimed Bessie, her face alive with excitement and intense relief. "She would have done it," answered John, "but I forbade her." "Forbade her? Oh, John!" The soft eyes looked amazement and reproach. "Yes," acknowledged John in a steady voice. "You see, her word would become instantly worthless. To be believed, her confession would have to be supported by the naming of the real thief." "And is the saving of a thief worth more to you than your church—your good name—your—your everything?" "In my conception, yes," John answered seriously. "That is what I have a church, a name, everything, for; to use it all in saving people—or in helping them, if the other is too strong a word." As her lover spoke in this lofty, detached, meditative tone, Bessie held him off and studied him. This was the new John Hampstead speaking; the man she did not know; the man who, up to the hour when cruel scandal smirched it, had stirred this community with the example of his life. Before this new man she felt her very soul bowing. She had loved the old John. She adored the new. "Oh, John! How brave! How strong! How right you are!" she exclaimed, with a note of adoration in her voice. A pang of self-reproach shot through the big man. "Not so brave—not so strong as I must—as I ought to be," he hastened to explain. "In fact, I have been doubting even if I were right, after all." Bessie’s startled look brought out of him like a confession the story of the last hours before her coming; the full meaning of the state in which she found him; how the burden of it all had overtoppled him; how she had come to find him not brave and certain, but doubting. "But now," she affirmed buoyantly, "you are strong, you are certain again." The very radiance, the fresh youthful happiness on the face of Bessie, checked the assent to this which was on his lips. He suddenly thought of what this action would mean to her, this beautiful, loving, aspiring young woman. She was his wife now in spirit. By some miracle of God their lives had in a moment been fused unalterably. He might bear a stigma for himself, but had he a right to assume a stigma for her? "Why, John," she murmured, wonder mingling with mild reproach, as she saw him hesitate. "Listen, my girl," began her lover, with infinite sympathy and tenderness in his manner, and gravely he re-sketched the elements in the situation as they would apply to her.