“I wish I could begin at the beginning and do it all over,—­all my life!” she thought.  “Somehow I’ve always thought it rather smart to say and do exactly as I pleased; to be the ringleader in all the mischief and make the teachers dread me, and have the girls afraid of me.  But Betty makes you look at things so differently.  I’d give anything I’ve got to have people remember me as they will her.  What must papa think of me?  I’m all he’s got, and he is so good to me!  Oh, it would have been better if I had never been born!  Every day I’ve lived I’ve left a whole road full of stones for somebody to jolt over.  Poor old Eliot can’t think of me as anything else than an imp of selfishness, for I’m always making it hard for her, and she’s a stranger in a strange land,’ and I ought to have remembered that she has feelings as well as I have, even if she is a servant.  And now Betty’s eyes—­”

She turned over on the bed, face downward, and began to cry.  It was just then that Mrs. Sherman tapped at the door.  For almost an hour Lloyd could hear the low murmur of voices going on inside the room, and knew that Eugenia was hearing now what she had always most sorely needed, a sympathetic, motherly talk.  If she could have had that loving advice, those straightforward words of warning, long ago, how much they might have done for the motherless child.  As it was, that hour opened Eugenia’s eyes to many things, and awakened a desire to grow more like the gentle woman beside her, sweet and sincere, unselfish and helpful.

Great was Mr. Forbes’s surprise one day, when he opened a letter from Eugenia in the dining-room at the Waldorf, to find that it covered eight pages, and was blistered in several places, as if she had dropped a tear or two as she wrote.  Usually she had a favour to ask when she wrote, and scrawled only a page or two; but this told the story of Betty’s blindness, her own part in the affair, and all that she had learned about the Road of the Loving Heart.  The newspaper clipping that Betty had treasured was enclosed, that he might read for himself the story of Tusitala that had left such an impression on her.

The letter touched him as nothing had done for years, and he read it a second time while he was going up to his office on the elevated.  Then at lunch-time, while he waited in his club-room, for lunch to be served, he took it out and read it again.  All that busy day between the demands that business made on him, and once even in the midst of dictating to his typewriter, his thoughts kept turning to that far-away island in the Southern seas, where Tusitala’s road gleams white under the tropic sun.  He had met Robert Louis Stevenson once, the tale-teller of Eugenia’s story, and he well understood the influence of that noble life over the old chiefs who called him “brother.”

The words that Eugenia had quoted in her letter rang in his ears all day, every way he turned:  “Fame dies and honours perish, but loving-kindness is immortal.” He seemed to hear them when a poor woman came into his office, asking for a position for her son.  They stopped the curt refusal on his lips, and caused him to take half an hour of his precious time to help her.