“We were friends.  Can it not be so again?  I have thought so long and so steadily about it that I no longer exactly know whether I may venture to write to you or whether the only thing decently left me is silence, which for the second time I am breaking now, because I cannot believe that I offered my friendship to such a man as you have said you are.  It is not in any woman to do it.  Perhaps it is self-respect that protests, repudiates, denies what you have said to me of yourself; and perhaps it is a sentiment less austere.  I can no longer judge.

“And now that I have the courage—­or effrontery—­to write you once more, will you misconstrue my letter—­and my motive?  If I cannot be reconciled to what I hear of you—­if what I hear pains, frightens me out of a justifiable silence which perhaps you might respect, will you respect my motive for breaking it the less?  I do not know.  But the silence is now broken, and I must endure the consequences.

“Deep unhappiness I have never known; but I recognise it in others when I see it, and would aid always if I could.  Try to understand me.

“But despair terrifies me—­I who never have known it—­and I do not understand how to meet it, how to cope with it in others, what to say or do.  Yet I would help if help is possible.  Is it?

“I think you have always thought me immature, young in experience, negligible as to wisdom, of an intellectual capacity inconsequential.

“These are the facts:  I was married when I was very young, and I have known little of such happiness; but I have met sorrow and have conquered it, and I have seen bitter hours, and have overcome them, and I have been tempted, and have prevailed.  Have you done these things?

“As for wisdom, if it comes only with years, then I have everything yet to learn.  Yet it seems to me that in the charity wards of hospitals, in the city prisons, in the infirmary, the asylum—­even the too brief time spent there has taught me something of human frailty and human sorrow.  And if I am right or wrong, I do not know, but to me sin has always seemed mostly a sickness of the mind.  And it is a shame to endure it or to harshly punish it if there be a cure.  And if this is so, what you may have done, and what others may have done to you, cannot be final.

“My letter is longer than I meant it, but I had a great need to speak to you.  If you still think well of me, answer me.  Answer in the way it pleases you best.  But answer—­if you still think well of me.

  “AILSA PAIGE.”

A touch of rose still tinted the sky overhead, but already the lamp lighters were illuminating the street lamps as he came to London Terrace—­that quaint stretch of old-time houses set back from the street, solemnly windowed, roofed, and pilastered; decorously screened behind green trees and flowering bushes ringed by little lawns of emerald.

For a moment, after entering the iron gateway and mounting the steps, he stood looking up at her abode.  Overhead the silken folds of the flag hung motionless in the calm evening air; and all the place about him was sweet with the scent of bridal-wreath and early iris.