"John has been much distressed lately," Helen began, looking down at her hands, clasping each other until the skin was white across the knuckles, "because I have not believed in eternal punishment. He has felt that my eternal happiness depended upon holding such a belief." Dr. Howe looked incredulous. "Some weeks ago, one of his elders came to him and told him I was spreading heresy in the church, and damning my own soul and the souls of others who might come to believe as I did,--you know I told Mrs. Davis that her husband had not gone to hell,--and he reproached John for neglecting me and his church too; for John, to spare me, had not preached as he used to, on eternal punishment. It almost killed him, uncle," she said, and her voice, which had given no hint of tears since her return, grew unsteady. "Oh, he has suffered so! and he has felt that it was his fault, a failure in his love, that I did not believe what he holds to be true." "Heavens!" cried the rector explosively, "heresy? Is this the nineteenth century?" "Since I have been away," Helen went on, without noticing the interruption, "they have insisted that I should be sessioned,--dealt with, they call it. John won't let me come back to that; but if that were his only reason, we could move away from Lockhaven. He has a nobler reason: he feels that this unbelief of mine will bring eternal misery to my soul, and he would convert me by any means. He has tried all that he knows (for oh, we have discussed it endlessly, uncle Archie!),--argument, prayer, love, tenderness, and now--sorrow." The rector was sitting very straight in his chair, his plump hands gripping the arms of it, and his lips compressed with anger, while he struggled for patience to hear this preposterous story through. "He makes me suffer," Helen continued, "that I may be saved. And indeed I don't see how he can do anything else. If a man believes his wife will be damned for all eternity unless she accepts certain doctrines, I should think he would move heaven and earth to make her accept them. And John does believe that. In denying reprobation, I deny revelation, he says, and also the Atonement, upon which salvation depends. So now you see why he says I shall not come back to him until I have found the truth." Then Dr. Howe burst into a torrent of indignant remonstrance. A clergyman send his wife from him because she does not believe some dogma! Were we back in the dark ages? It was too monstrously absurd! If the idiots he preached to forced him to do it, let him leave them; let him come to Ashurst. The rector would build him a meeting-house, and he could preach his abominable doctrine to anybody who was fool enough to go and hear him.