" she sobbed
from behind them.

"Then tell it me, that I may not be unjust to him."

"I can not."

"I won't take your word against yourself," returned Dorothy
determinedly. "You will have to tell me, or leave me to think the worst
of him." She was moved by no vulgar curiosity: how is one to help
without knowing? "Tell me, my dear," she went on after a little; "tell
me all about it, and in the name of the God in whom I hope to believe, I
promise to give myself to your service."

Thus adjured, Juliet found herself compelled. But with what
heart-tearing groans and sobs, with what intervals of dumbness, in which
the truth seemed unutterable for despair and shame, followed by what
hurrying of wild confession, as if she would cast it from her, the sad
tale found its way into Dorothy's aching heart, I will not attempt to
describe. It is enough that at last it was told, and that it had entered
at the wide-open, eternal doors of sympathy. If Juliet had lost a
husband, she had gained a friend, and that was something--indeed no
little thing--for in her kind the friend was more complete than the
husband. She was truer, more entire--in friendship nearly perfect. When
a final burst of tears had ended the story of loss and despair, a
silence fell.

"Oh, those men! those men!" said Dorothy, in a low voice of bitterness,
as if she knew them and their ways well, though never had kiss of man
save her father lighted on her cheek. "--My poor darling!" she said
after another pause, "--and he cast you from him!--I suppose a woman's
heart," she went on after a third pause, "can never make up for the loss
of a man's, but here is mine for you to go into the very middle of, and
lie down there."

Juliet had, as she told her story, risen to her knees. Dorothy was on
hers too, and as she spoke she opened wide her arms, and clasped the
despised wife to her bosom. None but the arms of her husband, Juliet
believed, could make her alive with forgiveness, yet she felt a strange
comfort in that embrace. It wrought upon her as if she had heard a
far-off whisper of the words: _Thy sins be forgiven thee_. And no
wonder: there was the bosom of one of the Lord's clean ones for her to
rest upon! It was her first lesson in the mighty truth that sin of all
things is mortal, and purity alone can live for evermore.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

TWO MORE MINDS.

Nothing makes a man strong like a call upon him for help--a fact which
points at a unity more del