Page:Held to Answer (1916).pdf/471

 of everything; to strip you until you were nothing but the man who once held me in his arms, his whole body quivering, and demanding with all his nature to possess me."

As the woman spoke, her voice had risen, and a half-insane enthusiasm was gleaming on her face, while her fingers reached restlessly after the minister who, as unconsciously as she advanced, receded until he stood cornered against the door.

"Now," she continued, in her frenzied exaltation of mood, "it is done! You see how easily it was accomplished. Nothing should be so disillusioning, so reawakening to you as to observe how light is your hold upon this community, how selfish and insincere was all this public adulation. I, a stranger almost, of whom these people knew nothing, was able, with a ridiculously impossible charge, to brush you from your eminence like a fly.

"Of what worth has it all been? Of what worth all that you can do for people like these? Your very church is turning against you. It will cast you out."

A shade had crossed the brow of Hampstead.

"You think that?" he asked defiantly.

"I know it," Marien replied aggressively. "That square-headed old Elder came to see me this afternoon. Shaking his hand was like taking hold of a toad. Ugh! He wanted to pry into your past through me, the old reprobate!"

"Hush! I will not hear him defamed. He is an honorable and a well-meaning man, against whose character not one word can be breathed."

Marien's eyes flashed. Impatient and regardless of interruption, she continued as though Hampstead had not spoken.

"And he, the father of the man you are suffering to