“But don’t you see—­I didn’t know it!  I never dreamed of such a thing.  The moment I heard how matters stood—­”

“Did it never occur to you in all this time that it might be assumed that Mr. Surface, having written all the reformatory articles, had written this one?”

“I did not think of that.  I was short-sighted, I own.  And of course,” he added more eagerly, “I supposed that he had told you himself.”

“You don’t know him,” said Sharlee.

A proud and beautiful look swept over her face.  West rose, looking wretchedly unhappy, and stood, irresolute, facing her.

“Can’t you—­forgive me?” he asked presently, in a painful voice.

Sharlee hesitated.

“Don’t you know I said that it would only make things worse to talk about it to-night?” she said gently.  “Everything you say seems to put us further and further apart.  Why, there is nothing for me to forgive, Mr. West.  There was a situation, and it imposed a certain conduct on you; that is the whole story.  I don’t come into it at all.  It is all a matter between you and—­your own-”

“You do forgive me then?  But no—­you talk to me just as though you had learned all this from somebody else—­as though I had not come to you voluntarily and told you everything.”

Sharlee did not like to look at his face, which she had always seen before so confident and gay.

“No,” said she sadly—­“for I am still your friend.”

“Friend!”

He echoed the word wildly, contemptuously.  He was just on the point of launching into a passionate speech, painting the bitterness of friendship to one who must have true love or nothing, and flinging his hand and his heart impetuously at her feet.  But looking at her still face, he checked himself, and just in time.  Shaken by passion as he was, he was yet enough himself to understand that she would not listen to him.  Why should he play the spendthrift and the wanton with his love?  Why give her, for nothing, the sterile satisfaction of rejecting him, for her to prize, as he knew girls did, as merely one more notch upon her gun?

Leaving his tempestuous exclamation hanging in mid-air, West stiffly shook Sharlee’s hand and walked blindly out of the room.

He went home, and to bed, like one moving in a horrible dream.  That night, and through all the next day, he felt utterly bereft and wretched:  something, say, as though flood and pestilence had swept through his dear old town and carried off everything and everybody but himself.  He crawled alone in a smashed world.  On the second day following, he found himself able to light a cigarette; and, glancing about him with faint pluckings of convalescent interest, began to recognize some landmarks.  On the third day, he was frankly wondering whether a girl with such overstrained, not to say hysterical ideals of conduct, would, after all, be a very comfortable person to spend one’s life with.