pit had grown to a mighty cloud, upon which stood
an archangel with a trumpet in his hand. He cried that the hour of the
great doom had come for all who bore within them the knowledge of any
evil thing neither bemoaned before God nor confessed to man. Then he
lifted the great silver trumpet with a gleam to his lips, and every
fiber of her flesh quivered in expectation of the tearing blast that was
to follow; when instead, soft as a breath of spring from a bank of
primroses, came the words, uttered in the gentlest of sorrowful voices,
and the voice seemed that of her unbelieving Paul: "I will arise and go
to my Father." It was no wonder, therefore, that she woke with a cry. It
was one of indescribable emotion. When she saw his face bending over her
in anxious love, she threw her arms round his neck, burst into a storm
of weeping, and sobbed.

"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 innoce