"Oh, no!" she said; "I shall never like being queen." Then, after a pause, she added honestly, "All the same, I could do things, then--things which I have longed to do; and I know that he would let me." Her face glowed at the prospect; and suddenly she turned upon him a full look of self-confidence and courage, and there was challenge in her tone. "I know far more about the poor than you do, father," she said, "and much more of their needs. If I were queen I would have a house down among the slums; and I would never spend Christmas, or Easter, or Good Friday in any other place." Her voice broke. "I would try--I would try," she said, "to set up Christianity in high places. That has been my dream." "Have you told your dream to the Prince?" She smiled tenderly, and with confidence. "He is already helping to make it come true. I asked him to be upon the Commission. That is why he is there." "You?" The Archbishop was now realizing that he knew very little about his daughter, and she not only amazed him, she frightened him. For the first time he feared that he might lose the great stakes for which he was playing; and one thing was essential--this woman, this domestic pawn which he held in his hand, must never be allowed to become queen. And so with great pain he forced himself, and spoke on. How right he had been when he told the Prime Minister that in one way or another sacrifice would be required of him! For now he was going to sacrifice his most sacred conventions, his ideal of how an unmarried woman should be trained. "My child," he said, "do you think that you know this man?" "Yes; I know him better than any one else in the world." "Do you also know his life?" Jenifer's look turned on him a little curiously. "I know," she said, "that he is not really a Christian." "Ah!" he exclaimed, in a sort of joy, decorously flavored with grief, "that I did not know! Of course that explains everything. The rest inevitably follows." "What follows?" "No man who is not a Christian leads a life that will stand looking into." And then, avoiding her eyes, he spoke of things which he knew; some of them in certain quarters were almost common property; of others he had only recently become informed. And as he spoke he felt, with a strange oppression, the heart beside him grow dumb. For this woman, with her clear and gracious understanding of so many human ills and weaknesses, had been kept in one matter, the most important of all, with the mind of an undeveloped child. Evil things she knew of--they had an existence, a place, and a name--but for her no reality except in their awful results. All that she had hitherto seen of "irregular living" bore the stamp of betrayal and disease, a thing more grossly criminal than anything else in the social body. She did not know how that body was permeated, and how no class and no ordinary standard of morality was free from the taint.