"Oh," he cried, once, when they had been talking until late into the night, "is not your soul's life of importance, Helen? When I see you going down to eternal death because I have failed in my duty to you, can I satisfy myself by saying, We love one another? Because I love you, I cannot be silent. Oh, I have wronged you, I have not loved you enough! I have been content with the present happiness of my love,--my happiness! I had no thought of yours." So they had gone over and over the subject, until to Helen it seemed threadbare, and they sat now in the dusky library, with long stretches of silence between their words. Alfaretta brought in the lamps. In view of Mrs. Ward's departure for a fortnight, her father, still with an eye to wages, deferred giving notice. "Besides," he thought, "Mrs. Ward may be convicted and converted after she's been dealt with." Helen had risen, and was writing some instructions for her maid: just what was to be cooked for the preacher, and what precautions taken for his comfort. As she put her pen down, she turned to look at her husband. He was sitting, leaning forward, with his head bowed upon his hand, and his eyes covered. "Helen," he said, in a low, repressed voice, "once more, just once more, let me entreat you; and then we will not speak of this before you go." She sighed. "Yes, dearest, say anything you want." There was a moment's silence, and then John rose, and stood looking down at her. "I have such a horror of your going away. I do not understand it; it is more than the grief and loneliness of being without you for a few days. It is vague and indefinable, but it is terribly real. Perhaps it is the feeling that atonement for my sin towards you is being placed out of my reach. You will be where I cannot help you, or show you the truth. Yet you will try to find it! I know you will. But now, just this last night, I must once more implore you to open your heart to God's Spirit. Ah, my Helen, I have sinned against Heaven and before you, but my punishment will be greater than I can bear if I enter heaven without you! Heaven? My God, it would be hell! The knowledge that my sin had kept you out--yet even as I speak I sin." He was walking up and down the room, his hands knotted in front of him, and his face filled with hopeless despair. "Yes, I sin even in this, for my grief is not that I have sinned against God in my duty to his people and in forgetting Him, but that I may lose you heaven, I may make you suffer!" Helen came to him, and tried to put her arms about him. "Oh, my dear," she said, "don't you understand? I have heaven now, in your love. And for the rest,--oh, John, be content to leave it in Hands not limited by our poor ideas of justice. If there is a God, and He is good, He will not send me away from you in eternity; if He is wicked and cruel, as this theology makes Him, we do not want his heaven! We will go out into outer darkness together."