nd heroism and devotion to duty? Oh, Christine, I could
worship you."

She rose to her feet and stood before him.

"I believe God will reward you in Heaven for those words," she said.
"You are a man who can see as He sees, in truth and clearness, and you
know, as He does, I have tried to do right. But what you do not know,
what He alone can know, is how I have suffered--how every sacred feeling
of my woman's heart has been torn and desecrated, and dragged to the
earth, and how I endured it all, because I thought it was my duty--and
all the time it was--Oh, I feel as if I don't know what may happen to me
next to drag me deeper down in misery and sorrow. I thought the worst
had come when my baby died, and now a thing so terrible has come as to
make that the comfort that I hug to my soul."

She sank to a seat on the couch again, and Noel came and took the place
at her side.

"Give me your hand," she said tremblingly. "Oh, I feel so frightened.
Now that this has come I feel that the air is full of awful horrors that
are waiting to fall upon me."

Noel took her hands in both his own, and she clung to them with a
pitiful intensity.

"The worst is over," he said gently. "You have only to let me manage and
think for you now--"

"Tell me," she said, "tell me all there is to know--how you found this
thing out, and what will be done about it. You must tell it every word
to me. I can bear it better now than ever to speak of it again."

And Noel told her, as mercifully and gently as he could, all that he had
learned from the lawyer's statements. He wanted to show her how
convincing and certain the proof was, that she might be justified in
acting on it. She held his hands in a hard grasp and looked at him with
excited, distended eyes as she listened to it all. The mixture of
wildness and calm in her manner and looks positively terrified him. He
feared her reason might be temporarily disturbed, and would have given
worlds to see her cry and complain, but she heard him through with the
same excited stillness.

"I have a safe and pleasant refuge for you for the present, Christine,"
he said. "I have arranged everything. A lady--a dear friend of mine,
whose son was my friend and a man I loved devotedly--this lady will take
you and care for you as a daughter. I have told her everything and she
is waiting for you now, longing to love and comfort you. Her son is dead
and she has often told me that I, as his friend, came next in he