"Oh Paul! husband! forgive me. I have sinned against you terribly--the worst sin a woman can commit. Oh Paul! Paul! make me clean, or I am lost." "Juliet, you are raving," he said, bewildered, a little angry, and at her condition not a little alarmed. For the confession, it was preposterous: they had not been many weeks married! "Calm yourself, or you will give me a lunatic for a wife!" he said. Then changing his tone, for his heart rebuked him, when he saw the ashy despair that spread over her face and eyes, "Be still, my precious," he went on. "All is well. You have been dreaming, and are not yet quite awake. It is the morphia you had last night! Don't look so frightened. It is only your husband. No one else is near you." With the tenderest smile he sought to reassure her, and would have gently released himself from the agonized clasp of her arms about his neck, that he might get her something. But she tightened her hold. "Don't leave me, Paul," she cried. "I was dreaming, but I am wide awake now, and know only too well what I have done." "Dreams are nothing. The will is not in them," he said. But the thought of his sweet wife even dreaming a thing to be repented of in such dismay, tore his heart. For he was one of the many--not all of the purest--who cherish an ideal of woman which, although indeed poverty-stricken and crude, is to their minds of snowy favor, to their judgment of loftiest excellence. I trust in God that many a woman, despite the mud of doleful circumstance, yea, even the defilement that comes first from within, has risen to a radiance of essential innocence ineffably beyond that whose form stood white in Faber's imagination. For I see and understand a little how God, giving righteousness, makes pure of sin, and that verily--by no theological quibble of imputation, by no play with words, by no shutting of the eyes, no oblivion, willful or irresistible, but by very fact of cleansing, so that the consciousness of the sinner becomes glistering as the raiment of the Lord on the mount of His transfiguration. I do not expect the Pharisee who calls the sinner evil names, and drags her up to judgment, to comprehend this; but, woman, cry to thy Father in Heaven, for He can make thee white, even to the contentment of that womanhood which thou hast thyself outraged. Faber unconsciously prided himself on the severity of his requirements of woman, and saw his own image reflected in the polish of his ideal; and now a fear whose presence he would not acknowledge began to gnaw at his heart, a vague suggestion's horrid image, to which he would yield no space, to flit about his brain. "Would to God it were a dream, Paul!" answered the stricken wife. "You foolish child!" returned the nigh trembling husband, "how can you expect me to believe, married but yesterday, you have already got tired of me!" "Tired of you, Paul! I should desire no other eternal paradise than to lie thus under your eyes forever."