“Oh!” she exclaimed.

“If persons wish to be married in church in these days merely because it is respectable, if such be their only reason, they are committing a great wrong.  They are taking an oath before God with reservations, knowing that public opinion will release them if the marriage does not fulfil their expectations.”

For a moment she gazed at him with parted lips, and pressing her handkerchief to her eyes began silently to cry.  The sudden spectacle, in this condition, of a self-controlled woman of the world was infinitely distressing to Hodder, whose sympathies were even more sensitive than (in her attempt to play upon them) she had suspected. . .  She was aware that he had got to his feet, and was standing beside her, speaking with an oddly penetrating tenderness.

“I did not mean to be harsh,” he said, “and it is not that I do not understand how you feel.  You have made my duty peculiarly difficult.”

She raised up to him a face from which the mask had fallen, from which the illusory look of youth had fled.  He turned away. . .  And presently she began to speak again; in disconnected sentences.

“I so want her to be happy—­I cannot think, I will not think that she has wrecked her life—­it would be too unjust, too cruel.  You cannot know what it is to be a woman!”

Before this cry he was silent.

“I don’t ask anything of God except that she shall have a chance, and it seems to me that he is making the world better—­less harsh for women.”

He did not reply.  And presently she looked up at him again, steadfastly now, searchingly.  The barriers of the conventions were down, she had cast her pride to the winds.  He seemed to read in her a certain relief.

“I am going to tell you something, Mr. Hodder, which you may think strange, but I have a reason for saying it.  You are still a young man, and I feel instinctively that you have an unusual career before you.  You interested me the first time you stepped into the pulpit of St. John’s —­and it will do me good to talk to you, this once, frankly.  You have reiterated to-day, in no uncertain terms, doctrines which I once believed, which I was brought up to think infallible.  But I have lived since then, and life itself has made me doubt them.

“I recognize in you a humanity, a sympathy and breadth which you are yourself probably not aware of, all of which is greater than the rule which you so confidently apply to fit all cases.  It seems to me that Christ did not intend us to have such rules.  He went beyond them, into the spirit.

“Under the conditions of society—­of civilization to-day, most marriages are merely a matter of chance.  Even judgment cannot foresee the development of character brought about by circumstances, by environment.  And in many marriages I have known about intimately both the man and the woman have missed the most precious thing that life can give something I cannot but think—­God intends us to have.  You see,”—­she smiled at him sadly—­“I am still a little of an idealist.