She brought with her such grace and sweetness of full womanly years that as she seated herself opposite him and lifted her veil away from the purity of her face, it was like the revelation of a shrine and the office became as a place of worship.  She lifted the veil from the dignity and seclusion of her life.  She did not speak at once but looked about her.  Many years had passed since she had entered that office, for it had long ago seemed best to each of them that they should never meet.  He had gone back to his seat at the desk with the opened books lying about him as though he had been searching one after another for the lost fountain of youth.  He sat there looking at her, his white hair falling over his leonine head and neck, over his clear mournful eyes.  The sweetness of his face, the kindness of it, the shy, embarrassed, almost guilty look on it from the old pain of being misunderstood—­the terrible pathos of it all, she saw these; but whatever her emotions, she was not a woman to betray them at such a moment, in such a place.

“I do not come on business,” she said.  “All the business seems to have been attended to; life seems very easy, too easy:  I have so little to do.  But I am here, Ravenel, and I suppose I must try to say what brought me.”

She waited for some time, unable to speak.

“Ravenel,” she said at length, “I cannot go on any longer without telling you that my great sorrow in life has been the wrong I did you.”

He closed his eyes quickly and stretched out his hand against her, as though to shut out the vision of things that rose before him—­as though to stop words that would unman him.

“But I was a young girl!  And what does a young girl understand about her duty in things like that?  I know it changed your whole life; you will never know what it has meant in mine.”

“Caroline,” he said, and he looked at her with brimming eyes, “if you had married me, I’d have been a great man.  I was not great enough to be great without you.  The single road led the wrong way—­to the wrong things!”

“I know,” she said, “I know it all.  And I know that tears do not efface mistakes, and that our prayers do not atone for our wrongs.”

She suddenly dropped her veil and rose,

“Do not come out to help me,” she said as he struggled up also.

He did not wish to go, and he held out his hand and she folded her soft pure hands about it; then her large noble figure moved to the side of his and through her veil—­her love and sorrow hidden from him—­she lifted her face and kissed him.

V

And during these days when Judge Morris was speaking his mind about old tragedies that never change, and new virtues—­about scandal and guilt and innocence—­it was during these days that the scandal started and spread and did its work on the boy he loved—­and no one had told him.