"Our very first emotion," the minister began, "must be one of sympathy for this well-meaning brother of ours who has been the unfortunate victim of a series of mistakes in which his has been by no means the greatest. While he sits before us overcome with humiliation and remorse, Elder Burbeck will pardon me if I speak for a moment as if he were not here. I wish to urge upon you all that no one—least of all myself—should reproach him for the thing which he has done. I have never doubted that he was acting in all good conscience. The succession of events, once it had begun to march, has been so remarkable that now, looking back, we must each and all of us feel how puny are men and women to resist the winds of circumstance which blow upon them. "To me, granting the beginning of this strange series of events for which I am at least in part to blame, it seems now that all the rest has been inevitable. I think we should reproach no one. Certainly I shall not. Instead, I am thinking that it is a time for great rejoicing. That mother who has so many times shown us the better way, has shown it to-night. Looking up to her son whose act of moral courage, witnessing to the new character that he has been building, has made possible the happy climax of this tragic hour—looking up to him she has said: ’I never had so much to live for as now.’ That should be the feeling of each one of us. "The events of to-night must have been graven deeply into all our hearts. None of us can ever be quite the same. Each must start afresh, with our lives enriched by the lesson and by the experiences of this hour. "It has brought to me the keenest suffering, the bitterest disappointment, that I have ever known. It has brought to me also a deepening faith in the marvelous power of God to overrule the most untoward incidents to His glory. It has brought to me also the greatest gift that any man can have upon the side of his earthly relations,—a joy so great, so supreme, so ineffable that I cannot speak farther than to say to you that it is mine to-night; and that you look into my eyes at the happiest moment I have ever known." There was a movement in the gallery. A tall woman, heavily veiled, with an air of unmistakable distinction about her, arose and mounted the aisle step by step to the stairway leading downward. Desiring with all the violent impetuosity of her nature to break out with the truth that would vindicate the man she loved so hopelessly and had involved so terribly, Marien had nevertheless been true to her vow of silence. But she had brought Rollie Burbeck to this meeting, and she had kept him there. At the critical moment she had sent him down to stand beside his mother, until the young man’s clay-like soul at last had fluxed and fused into the moulding of a man. Having seen the mischief she had wrought undone, so far as anything done ever is undone, she was leaving now, when the minister had begun to speak of what she could not bear to hear.