love there is still in your heart for him. That you know - whether there is enough for you to be able to forgive him. If there is - forgive him!'

`No,' Dolly was beginning, but Anna cut her short, kissing her hand once more.

`I know more of the world than you do,' she said. I know how men like Stiva look at it. You speak of his talking of you with her. That never happened. Such men are unfaithful, but their own home and wife are sacred to them. Somehow or other these women are still looked on with contempt by them, and do not touch on their feeling for their family. They draw a sort of line that can't be crossed between them and their families. I don't understand it, but it is so.'

`Yes, but he has kissed her...'

`Dolly, hush, darling. I saw Stiva when he was in love with you. I remember the time when he came to me and cried, talking of you, and of what a poetry and loftiness you were for him, and I know that the longer he has lived with you the loftier you have been in his eyes. You know we have sometimes laughed at him for putting in at every word: `Dolly's a marvelous woman.' have always been a divinity for him, and you are that still, and this has not been a passion of the heart...

`But if it be repeated?'

`It cannot be, as I understand it...

`Yes, but could you forgive it?'

`I don't know, I can't judge... No, I can judge,' said Anna, thinking a moment; and grasping the position in her thought and weighing it in her inner balance, she added: `Yes, I can, I can, I can. Yes, I could forgive. I could not be the same, no; but I could forgive, and forgive as though it had never been, never been at all....'

`Oh, of course,' Dolly interposed quickly, as though saying what she had more than once thought, `else it would not be forgiveness. If one forgives, it must be completely, completely. Come, let us go; I'll take you to your room,' she said, getting up, and on the way she embraced Anna. `My dear, how glad I am you came. It has made things better, ever so much better.'