Which was it?  Oh, was not Mr. Dayne right, as he always was?  Where was there any room for doubt?

Long before Sharlee knew Charles Gardiner West personally, when she was a little girl and he just out of college, she had known him by report as a young man of fine ideals, exalted character, the very pattern of stainless honor.  Her later intimate knowledge of him, she told herself, had fully borne out the common reputation.  Wherever she had touched him, she had found him generous and sound and sweet.  That he was capable of what seemed to her the baldest and basest treachery was simply unthinkable.  And what reason was there ever to drag his name into her thought of the affair at all?  Was it not Mr. Queed who had written all the reformatory articles since Colonel Cowles’s death—­Mr. Queed who had promised only twenty-four hours ago to do his utmost for the cause at the critical moment to-day?

And yet ... and yet ... her mind clung desperately to the thought that possibly the assistant editor had not done this thing, after all.  The memory of his visit to her, less than a week ago, was very vivid in her mind.  What sort of world was it that a man with a face of such shining honesty could stoop to such shabby dishonesty?—­that a man who had looked at her as he had looked at her that night, could turn again and strike her such a blow?  That Queed should have done this seemed as inconceivable as that West should have done it.  There was the wild hundredth chance that neither had done it, that the article had been written by somebody else and published by mistake.

But the hope hardly fluttered its wings before her reason struck it dead.  No, there was no way out there.  The fact was too plain that one of her two good friends, under what pressure she could not guess, had consented to commit dishonor and, by the same stroke, to wound her so deeply.  For no honest explanation was possible; there was no argument in the case to-day that was not equally potent a month ago.  It was all a story of cajolery or intimidation from the formidable opposition, and of mean yielding in the places of responsibility.  And—­yes—­She felt it as bad for one of her two friends to be so stained as another.  It had come to that.  At last she must admit that they stood upon level ground in her imagination, the nameless little Doctor of two years back side by side with the beau ideal of all her girlhood.  One’s honor was as dear to her as another’s; one’s friendship as sweet; and now one of them was her friend no more.

And it was not West whom she must cast out.  There was no peg anywhere to hang even the smallest suspicion of him upon.  She scourged her mind for seeking one.  It was Queed who, at the pinch, had broken down and betrayed them with a kiss:  Queed, of the obscure parentage, dubious inheritance, and omitted upbringing; Queed, whom she had first stood upon his feet and started forward in a world of men, had helped and counseled and guided, had admitted to her acquaintance, her friendship—­for this.