Penhallow rose, set a hand on Rivers’s shoulder, seeing the sweat on his forehead and the appeal of the sad eyes turned up to meet his gaze.  “What,” he said, “would our children have been without you?  God knows I have been a better man for your company, and the mills—­the village—­how can you fail to see what you have done—­”

“No—­no—­I am a failure.  It may be that the moods of self-reproach are morbid.  That too torments me.  Even to-day I was thinking of how Christ would have dealt with that miserable man, Peter Lamb, and how uncharitable I was, how crude, how void of sympathy—­”

“You—­you—­” said Penhallow, as he moved away.  “My own regret is that I did not turn him over to the law.  Well, points of view do differ curiously.  We will let him drop.  He will come to grief some day.  And now take my thanks and my dear Ann’s for what you have told me.  Let us drop that too.  Take a pipe.”

“No, I must go.  I am the easier in my mind, but I am tired and not at all in the pipe mood.”  He went out through the hall, and with a hasty “good-night” to his hostess and “pleasant dreams—­or none,” went slowly down the avenue.

The woman he left, with her knitting needles at rest a moment, was considering the man and his moods with such intuitive sympathy and comprehension as belongs to the sex which is physiologically the more subject to abrupt changes in the climate of the mind.  As her husband entered, she began anew the small steadying industry for which man has no substitute.

“Upon my word, James, when you desire to exchange confidences, you must get further away from me.”

“You don’t mean me to believe you overheard our talk in the library, with the door closed and the curtain across it.”  Her acuteness of hearing often puzzled him, and he had always to ask for proof.

She nodded gay assurance, and said again, ceasing to knit, “I overheard too much—­oh, not all—­bits—­enough to trouble me.  I moved away so as not to hear.  All I care to know is how to be of real service to a friend to whom we owe so much.”

“I want you—­in fact, Mark wants you—­to hear in full what you know in part.”

“Well, James, I have very little curiosity about the details of the misfortunes of my friends unless to know is to obtain means of helpfulness.”

“You won’t get any here, I fear, but as he has been often strange and depressed and, as he says, unresponsive to your kindness, he does want you now to see what cause there was.”

“Very well, if he wants it.  I see you have a letter.”

“Yes, I kept it.  It was marked strictly confidential—­I hate that—­” She smiled as he added, “It seems to imply the possibility of indiscretion on my part.”

“Oh, James!  Oh, you dear man!” and she laughed outright, liking to tease where she deeply loved, knowing him through and through, as he never could know her.  Then she saw that he was not in the mood for jesting with an edge to it; nor was she.  “At all events, you did not let me see that letter—­now I am to see it.”