This rude and unfeeling language hurt Aleck to the heart, and she went from the presence crying.  That spectacle went to his own heart, and in his pain and shame he would have given worlds to have those unkind words back.  She had uttered no syllable of reproach —­and that cut him.  Not one suggestion that he look at his own record —­and she could have made, oh, so many, and such blistering ones!  Her generous silence brought a swift revenge, for it turned his thoughts upon himself, it summoned before him a spectral procession, a moving vision of his life as he had been leading it these past few years of limitless prosperity, and as he sat there reviewing it his cheeks burned and his soul was steeped in humiliation.  Look at her life—­how fair it was, and tending ever upward; and look at his own—­how frivolous, how charged with mean vanities, how selfish, how empty, how ignoble!  And its trend—­never upward, but downward, ever downward!

He instituted comparisons between her record and his own.  He had found fault with her—­so he mused—­he!  And what could he say for himself?  When she built her first church what was he doing?  Gathering other blase multimillionaires into a Poker Club; defiling his own palace with it; losing hundreds of thousands to it at every sitting, and sillily vain of the admiring notoriety it made for him.  When she was building her first university, what was he doing?  Polluting himself with a gay and dissipated secret life in the company of other fast bloods, multimillionaires in money and paupers in character.  When she was building her first foundling asylum, what was he doing?  Alas!  When she was projecting her noble Society for the Purifying of the Sex, what was he doing?  Ah, what, indeed!  When she and the W. C. T. U. and the Woman with the Hatchet, moving with resistless march, were sweeping the fatal bottle from the land, what was he doing?  Getting drunk three times a day.  When she, builder of a hundred cathedrals, was being gratefully welcomed and blest in papal Rome and decorated with the Golden Rose which she had so honorably earned, what was he doing?  Breaking the bank at Monte Carlo.

He stopped.  He could go no farther; he could not bear the rest.  He rose up, with a great resolution upon his lips:  this secret life should be revealing, and confessed; no longer would he live it clandestinely, he would go and tell her All.

And that is what he did.  He told her All; and wept upon her bosom; wept, and moaned, and begged for her forgiveness.  It was a profound shock, and she staggered under the blow, but he was her own, the core of her heart, the blessing of her eyes, her all in all, she could deny him nothing, and she forgave him.  She felt that he could never again be quite to her what he had been before; she knew that he could only repent, and not reform; yet all morally defaced and decayed as he was, was he not her own, her very own, the idol of her deathless worship?  She said she was his serf, his slave, and she opened her yearning heart and took him in.