s no matter, her best impulses must surely move
all her heart towards him, and at last he heard from her a soft answer,
which was nevertheless a clear affirmative, and now, not only hands but
lips joined in this rare moment, and Pauline, no longer estimating the
minister as one unlearned in the subtle lists of love, felt happier
than she had done for months. She had made, she told herself, the best
choice offered her, and for the moment she swore resolutions of holy
living and quiet dying, all in the character of Ringfield's wife. As
for him, the kiss had sealed all and changed all.

"Now at last I shall live again, be a free agent, able to do my work!
You can have no conception of what it has been for me to get up my
sermons, for example, or to go about among the people here, thinking of
you, wondering if you would ever come to me or not. I have pictured
you going back to that other man, and I have hated you for it, hated
you both!"

"Oh--hush, hush, be careful!" Miss Clairville, like all women, was now
afraid of the passion she had awakened. "Let us get to work--some one
may come in--you do not mind helping me now?"

"Not--if you mean what you say! Not--if this time you are telling me
the truth!"

"You cannot forget that lapse of mine, it seems. Well, I do mean it, I
do, I do! And you--you mean it too? You would take me even with my
past, and that past unexplained, with my faults and my temper?"

"I have told you before that I would," he returned firmly. "No matter
what has happened; no matter what you have done, what anyone else has
done, I would, I will, I do take you! You are Heaven's choicest,
dearest gift to me--and what am I but an erring man trying to walk
straight and see straight!"

Miss Clairville's eyes sparkled with mischief, while her mouth remained
solemn.

"Then you must not talk of hating. Love your enemies, Mr. Ringfield,
and bless them that persecute you. That isn't in the Catholic Manual
in those words perhaps, but I have seen it somewhere, I think in the
Testament Nouveau. You see---- I am always 'good Methodist' as our
friend Poussette would say."

"You shall be a better one in the future," exclaimed Ringfield,
tenderly, and as at that moment Poussette himself appeared, to lend
assistance, the interview was at an end.

And now ensued a scene which a week earlier would have sorely tried
Ringfield's patience, but which now sufficed to amuse him, so secure
was he in Pauline