“No, no! Cis told me to ask you to let her alone awhile, till she pulls herself together,” Tom said. “Nan, the woman looked about all in. If she dies will Cis--?” “I don’t know, I can’t tell,” cried Nan. “I hope not. Yet I see it would do everything for that man. It may be the way he’ll come right. We never can see ahead of the day. But, Tommy dear, don’t mind too much. I’m quite sure, whether it is Rodney Moore again or not, that it will never be you. I’m sorry, buddy, but that is true.” “No need of your saying so,” growled Tom. “Cis said it herself, so plain that it doesn’t need footnotes for me to get it. All the same--” Tom stopped, turning away. “Yes, I say so, too! All the same I’d hate it to be Rodney Moore. But maybe it is Cis’s work to save his soul,” said Nan, picking up her son, finding him an effectual restorative. “Oh, his soul!” exclaimed Tom, and his tone sounded like an anathema. “I call it going pretty far to make a nice girl marry a man to save his soul!” “We ought to be willing to die to save a soul,” Nan reminded him. “I’m perfectly willing that lots of people should die to save a soul, but I ain’t willing one girl should marry to save one, not when the girl is Cis,” said Tom stalking off in disgust the stronger that he had been badly shaken in nerves. Up in her room Cis knelt before the window, staring out into the top of a spruce tree outside Nan’s little house. It was a long time before she could think coherently. The horror of the suicide so nearly accomplished; the almost equal horror of the woman’s degradation; the unmistakable stamp upon her of vice, upon her who was Rodney’s wife, yet who was not in any true sense his wife, nor could be the wife of any honest man, filled Cicely with shuddering confusion. It was as if she had a vision of what it meant when one said: “A lost soul.” Pity for Rodney overwhelmed her, yet, unjustly or justly, Cis felt as though he were stained by the vileness of this bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. “And they two shall be as one flesh.” The words echoed within her mind, empty of connected thoughts, tense with fragments of thoughts which at once confused and tortured her poignantly. After a time Cis began to realize fully what had befallen her. She had parted from Rod because this woman lived. She had chanced upon her at barely the right time to secure her continuing to live; she had saved her from suicide, kept her alive to shackle Rodney, according to the law which had bound them together, but had given her another chance for Eternal Life. Now she lay within the spotless physical and spiritual purity of the House of the Good Shepherd. It was Cicely Adair, who had been so sore beset with temptation to marry this woman’s husband, who had been allowed to lead her inside the Good Shepherd’s field where she might, if she would, become that sheep which He bore upon His shoulders into safety.