“It is to you; it is to yourself that you must make the reparation.  And you must make it now.  There may never be a time like this; it is your great opportunity.”

“You think, you ask—­” he began warily; and she was quick to see that the precise moment for the full stroke had not come; that the ground required preparation.

“I think,” she interrupted, smiling gravely, “that you want me to be your friend.  More than that, we have long been friends.  And deep down in your heart I believe you want my regard; you want me to think well of you.  And I must tell you that there’s a kind of happiness—­for it must be happiness—­that comes to me at the thought of it.  Something there is between you and me that is different; somehow we understand each other.”

His response was beyond anything she had hoped for; a light shone suddenly in his face.  There was no doubt of the sincerity of the feeling with which he replied:—­

“Yes; I have felt it; I felt it the first day we met!”

“And because there is this understanding, this tie, I dare to be frank with you:  I mean to make your reparation difficult.  But you will not refuse it; you will not disappoint me.  I mean, that you must throw away the victory you are prepared to win.”

He shook his head slowly, but he could not evade the pleading of her eyes.

“I can’t do it; it’s too much,” he muttered.  “It’s the goal I have sought for ten years.  It would be like throwing away life itself.”

“Yes; it would be bitter; but it would be the first sacrifice you ever made in your life.  You have built your life on lies.  You have lurked in shadows, hating the light.  You have done your work in the dark, creeping, hiding, mocking, vanishing.  What you propose doing to-night in anticipating the blow of your enemy is only an act of bravado.  There is no real courage in that.  When you thrust Dan Harwood into the convention to utter your sneer for you, it was the act of a coward.  And that was contemptible cowardice.  You picked him up, a clean young man of ideals, and tried to train him in your cowardly shadow ways.  When the pricking of your conscience made you feel some responsibility for me, you manifested it like a coward.  You sent a cowardly message to the best man that ever lived, not knowing, not caring how it would wound him.  And you have been a great thief, stealing away from men the thing they should prize most, but you have taught them to distrust it—­their faith in their country—­even more, their faith in each other!  The shadows have followed you to your own home.  You have hidden yourself behind a veil of mystery, so that your own wife and children don’t know the man you are.  You have never been true to anything—­not to yourself, not to those who should be near and dear to you.  And you have sneered at the people who send you here to represent them; you have betrayed them, not once but a hundred times; and you know it hasn’t paid.  You are the unhappiest man in the world.  But there’s a real power in you, or you could never have done the things you have done—­the mean and vile things.  You have brains and a genius for organizing and managing men.  You could never have lasted so long without the personal qualities that a man must have to lead men.  And you have led them, down and down.”