She's God's own good woman, and He made her what she is. I wish I could
have borne her, or she me, and the tenderness of her arms was a
sacrament. We two women just stood aside with life's artifices and
concealments and let our own hearts do the talking.

She said she had come because she felt that if she talked with me I
might be better able to understand Alfred when he came, and that she had
seen that the judge was very determined, and she thoroughly recognised
his force of character. We stopped there while I gave her the document
to read. I suppose it was dishonourable, but I needed her protection
from it. I'm glad she had the strength of mind to walk with a head high
in the air to the fire and burn it up. Anything might have happened if
she hadn't. And even now I feel that only my marriage vows will close up
the case for the judge--even yet he may-- But when Ruth had got done
with Alfred, she had wiped Judge Wade's appreciation of him completely
off my mind and destroyed it in tender words that burned us both worse
than Jane's fire burned the letter. She did me an awfully good service.

"And so you see, you lovely woman, you, do you not, that you were for
him, as a tribute to his greatness, and it is given to you to fulfil a
destiny?" She was so beautiful as she said it that I had to turn my eyes
away, but I felt as I did when those solemn "_let-not-man-put-asunder_"
words were spoken over me by Mr. Raines, our minister. It made me
frightened, and before I knew it I had poured out the whole truth to her
in a perfect cataract of words. The truth always acts on women as some
hitherto untried drug, and you can never tell what the reaction is going
to be. In this case I was stricken dumb and found it hard to see.

"Oh, dear heart," she exclaimed as she reached out and drew me into her
lovely gracious arms, "then the privilege is all the more wonderful for