Page:Held to Answer (1916).pdf/479

 pulse of pain, she was purposing to bind the thing together and let its every throb be a word of warning to womankind.

"I learned it from you," she explained, almost as if she had read his thoughts. "I understand now the exalted mood in which you spoke a few minutes ago. I am sorry that I have lost you; but I am not sorry that I have hurled you down, since it leaves revealed a nobler figure of a man than I had thought existed."

Hampstead shuddered, in part at his own pain, in part at the ease with which she uttered the sentiment, because this woman could really never know how much his fall had cost him.

"Each of us in life I fear must be held to answer for his own obtuseness," he suggested.

"But that is not all we are held to answer for," Miss Dounay replied with sudden perception. "We must pay the penalty of the obtuseness of others."

"Ah!" exclaimed the minister quickly. "There you stumbled upon one of the greatest truths in religion, the law of vicarious suffering. We are each compelled, whether we will or not, to suffer for the sins of others. If we, you or I, mere humanity that we are, can so manage such suffering that it becomes a redemptive influence over the life of the one who caused it, we have done in a small and distant way the thing which the Son of Man did so perfectly for all the world."

"I see," she exclaimed eagerly, pressing her hands together in a sort of rapture. "It is that which you have done for me. You have suffered for my sin, and you have so managed the suffering that you have taken away some of my selfishness and will send me out of here, as I said before, not with an ambition, but with a mission."

She had risen, and though her manner was still sub-