“Nobody knows but you.”

“That’s why Pierce kept postponing.  And I, living under the shadow of this!  How can I thank you!”

“Don’t thank me,” she said with an effort.  “I—­I’ve known it for weeks.  I meant to tell you long ago, but I thought you’d have learned it before now—­and—­and it was made hard for me.”

“Was that what you had to tell me about the paper, when you asked me to come to see you?”

She nodded.

“But how could I come?” he burst out.  “I suppose there’s no use—­I must go and tell Mac about this.”

“Wait,” she said.

He stopped, gazing at her doubtfully.

“I’m tearing down the tenement at Number 9.”

“Tearing it down?”

“As a confession that—­that you were right.  But I didn’t know I owned it.  Truly I didn’t.  You’ll believe that, won’t you?”

“Of course,” he cried eagerly.  “I did know it, but too late.”

“If you’d known in time would you have—­”

“Left that out of the paper?” he finished, all the life gone from his voice.  “No, Esme.  I couldn’t have done that.  But I could have said in the paper that you didn’t know.”

“I thought so,” she said very quietly.

He misinterpreted this.  “I can’t lie to you, Esme,” he said with a sad sincerity.  “I’ve lived with lies too long.  I can’t do it, not for any hope of happiness.  Do I seem false and disloyal to you?  Sometimes I do to myself.  I can’t help it.  All a man can do is to follow his own light.  Or a woman either, I suppose.  And your light and mine are worlds apart.”

Again, with a stab of memory, he saw that desperate smile on her lips.  Then she spoke with the clear courage of her new-found womanliness.

“There is no light for me where you are not.”

He took a swift step toward her.  And at the call, sweetly and straightly, she came to meet his arms and lips.

“Poor boy!” she said, a few minutes later, pushing a lock of hair from his forehead.  “I’ve let you carry that burden when a word from me would have lifted it.”

“Has there ever been such a thing as unhappiness in the world, sweetheart?” he said.  “I can’t remember it.  So I don’t believe it.”

“I’m afraid I’ve cost you more than I can ever repay you for,” she said.  “Hal, tell me I’ve been a little beast!—­Oh, no!  That’s no way to tell it.  Aren’t you sorry, sir, that you ever saw this room?”

“Finest example of interior architecture I know of.  Exact replica of the plumb center of Paradise.”

“It’s where all your troubles began.  You first met me here in this very room.”

“Oh, no!  My troubles began from the minute I set eyes on you, that day at the station.”

“Don’t contradict me.”  She laid an admonitory finger on his lips, then, catching at his hand, gently drew him with her.  “Right in that very window-seat there—­” She whisked the hangings aside, and brushed McGuire Ellis’s nose in so doing.