t 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."

John shuddered. "Lay not this sin to her charge," she heard him say; "she
knows not what she says. Yet I--Oh, Helen, that same thought has come to
me. You seemed to make my heaven,--you; and I was tempted to choose you
and darkness, rather than my God. Sin, sin, sin,--I cannot get away from
it. Yet if I could only save you! But there again I distrust my motive:
not for God's glory, but for my own love's sake, I would save you. My
God, my God, be merciful to me a sinner!"

In his excitement, he had pushed her arm from his shoulder, and stood in
tense and trembling silence, looking up, as though listening for an
answer to his prayer.

Helen dared not speak. There is a great gulf fixed between the nearest
and dearest souls when in any spiritual anguish; even love cannot pass
it, and no human tenderness can fathom it. Helen could not enter into
this holiest of holies, where her husband's soul was prostrate before its
Maker. In the solitude of grief and remorse he was alone.

It was this isolation from him which broke her calm. It seemed profane
even to look upon his suffering. She shrank away from him, and hid her
face in her hands. That roused him, and in a moment the old tenderness
enveloped her.

He comforted her with silent love, until she ceased to tremble, and
looked again into his tender eyes.

"What I wanted to say," he said, after a while, when she was leaning
quietly against his breast, "was just to tell you