“Oh, Dermott!” she pleaded, the Irish form of speech coming back to her.  “You’ll just be forgiving me, won’t you?” She put her hand on his sleeve and looked up at him with imploring eyes.  “You must know how great and good I still believed you to be when I tell you that I came to you to ask you to help him.  I’ve some money—­the Countess, you know,” she explained—­“and I thought if you’d faith in my voice—­and ye’ve said often that ye have—­that if”—­she broke into a storm of weeping—­“if you’d just lend him the money that’s needed I could sing the debt clear in the years to come.”

Dermott looked down at the bowed head upon his old desk, his eyes moist, his lips twitching.

“Perhaps,” he broke in, the angry light still in his eyes, “ye’ll tell me who accuses me of this business?”

For answer she extended toward him the yellow paper which Barney had given her, signed with John Marix’s initials.

“And so you believed Barney, although ye know his weakness for jumping at conclusions?  Ye must have believed him, for my name’s not mentioned here,” he said, looking at the paper.

“He told me Mr. Marix had intimated to him that you were behind the attack.”

“Ah! and so it’s Marix that’s been misusing my name, is it?” he cried, his eyes narrowed.  “I’ll settle with him!” And then, “Ye love Ravenel, Katrine?”

“Yes,” she answered:  “there’s just nothing else in life for me.”

“And after all that’s gone between him and me, you are asking me to help him?”

“Dermott,” she said, gravely, sobbing between the words, “I came to you because I have always known the greatness, the selflessness of you, and I trust you.”

They stood in silence, not looking at each other.

“I have no one else,” she went on.  “There is no one else in the world I trust as I do you.”

He held himself more erect at the words, a great light in his face.

“You are the only one who has always, always been kind to me,” she continued, “and I’d give all there is of me to come to you, heart whole, as your wife.  But I can’t do it, Dermott, I can’t do it!  I’ve tried; no one knows how I tried to forget this love in my heart.  I studied to forget, worked to forget, willed to forget, but”—­and here she spoke the truth of life—­“when great love has once been between a man and a woman, the man may forget, but the woman never.  I’ve wealth and beauty, they say, and gift, and they’re all just nothing to me except to help him.  Before I’d been two days at the Van Rensselaer’s it was just as it had been in Carolina.  It was only fear that kept me from saying I’d marry him.”

“He wants to marry you now?  He has asked you?” Dermott spoke softly for her sake, keeping from his voice the scorn he felt for Ravenel.

“Yes,” she returned.  “And I know all you’re thinking; but it makes no difference!  When I think of him, ill, perhaps dying, his fortune gone, and nameless, maybe, as well, I’d give my soul to save him!” she cried, tear-eyed and pale, but glorious in self-abnegation.