“Oh, but I don’t know at all that it is,” said Miss Avery, hastily.  “That is just the point.  The last I heard of it, she had forbidden him her house.”

“That won’t do,” said Charles Gardiner West, in a burst of generosity.  “I’ll clear up that difficulty before I sleep to-night.”

And he was as good as his word, or, let us say, almost as good.  The next night but one he called upon Sharlee Weyland with two unalterable purposes in his mind.  One was to tell her the full inside history of the reformatory article from the beginning.  The other was to notify her in due form that she held his heart in permanent captivity.

To Miss Avery, it made not the slightest difference whether the gifted and charming editor of the Post sold out his principles for a price every morning in the month.  At his pleasure he might fracture all of the decalogue that was refinedly fracturable, and so long as he rescued his social position intact from the ruin, he was her man just the same.  But she had an instinct, surer than reasoned wisdom, that Sharlee Weyland viewed these matters differently.  Therefore she had sent West to make his little confession, face to face.  And therefore West, after an hour of delightful tete-a-tete in the charming little back parlor, stiffened himself up, his brow sicklying o’er with the pale cast of disagreeable thought, and began to make it.

“I’ve got to tell you something about—­a subject that won’t be welcome to you,” he plunged in, rather lugubriously.  “I mean—­the reformatory.”

Sharlee’s face, which had been merry and sweet, instantly changed and quieted at that word; interest sprang full-armed in her deep blue eyes.

“Have you?  Tell me anything about it you wish.”

“You remember that—­last editorial in the Post?”

“Do you think that I forget so easily?”

West hardly liked that reply.  Nor had he ever supposed that he would find the subject so difficult.

“Well!  I was surprised and—­hurt to learn—­recently—­that you had—­well, had been rather severe with Surface, under the impression that—­the full responsibility for that article was his.”

Sharlee sat in the same flowered arm-chair she had once occupied to put this same Surface, then known as little Dr. Queed, in his place.  Her heart warmed to West for his generous impulse to intercede.  Still, she hardly conceived that her treatment of Mr. Surface was any concern of Mr. West’s.

“And so?”

“I must tell you,” he said, oddly uneasy under her straightforward look, “that—­that you have made a mistake.  The responsibility is mine.”

“Ah, you mean that you, as the editor, are willing to take it.”

“No,” said West—­“no”; and then suddenly he felt like a rash suicide, repentant at the last moment.  Already the waters were rushing over his head; he felt a wild impulse to clutch at the life-belt she had flung out to him.  It is to be remembered to his credit that he conquered it.  “No,—­I—­I wrote the article myself.”