How small a part it had played with her, poor child.  She had been betrayed by her strange imagination and suddenly awakened passion; she had followed blindly where he had led, but when catastrophe had threatened one who had been part of her former life—­familiar with all that was real to her—­how readily the untamed instinct had reverted to its own!

And he—­Truedale comforted himself—­he had come back to his own, and his own had made its claim upon him.  Why should he not have his second chance?  He wanted love—­not friendship; he wanted—­Lynda!  All else faded and Lynda, the new Lynda—­Lynda with the hair that had learned to curl, the girl with the pretty white shoulders and sweet, kind eyes—­stood pleadingly close in the shabby old room and demanded recognition.  “She thinks,” and here Truedale covered his eyes, “that I am—­as I was when I began my life—­here!  What would she say—­if she knew?  She, God bless her, is not like others.  Faithful, pure, she could not forgive the truth!”

Truedale, thinking so of Lynda Kendall, owned to his best self that because the woman who now filled his life held to her high ideals—­would never lower them—­he could honour and reverence her.  If she, like him, could change, and accept selfishly that which she would scorn in another, she would not be the splendid creature she was.  And yet—­without conceit or vanity—­Truedale believed that Lynda felt for him what he felt for her.

Never doubting that he could bring to her an unsullied past, she was, delicately, in finest woman-fashion, laying her heart open to him.  She knew that he had little to offer and yet—­and yet—­she was—­willing!  Truedale knew this to be true.  And then he decided he must, even at this late day, tell Lynda of the past.  For her sake he dare not venture any further concealment.  Once she understood—­once she recovered from her surprise and shock—­she would be his friend, he felt confident of that; but she would be spared any deeper personal interest.  It was Lynda’s magnificent steadfastness that now appealed to Truedale.  With the passing of his own season of madness, he looked upon this calm serenity of her character with deepest admiration.

“The best any man should hope for,” he admitted—­turning, as he thought, his back upon his yearning—­“any man who has played the fool as I have, is the sympathetic friendship of a good woman.  What right has a man to fall from what he knows a woman holds highest, and then look to her to change her ideals to fit his pattern?”

Arriving at this conclusion, Truedale wrapped the tattered shreds of his self-respect about him and accepted, as best he could, the prospect of Lynda’s adjustment to the future.

Brace and Lynda did not return in time to see Truedale that night.  At twelve, with a resigned sigh, he put away his play and went to his lonely rooms in the tall apartment farther uptown.  His dog was waiting for him with the reproachful look in his faithful eyes that reminded Truedale that the poor beast had not had an outing for twenty-four hours.