“Yes—­and how did you know it?”

“Perry Thomas saw you that night when you went to stay a minute.”

The color left Tim’s face and he leaned back in his chair, away from the light into the shadow, and whistled softly.

“You knew it, then,” he said, after a long while.  “I didn’t intend you should, Mark.  I didn’t intend you ever should.”

“Naturally,” said I in an icy tone.

“Naturally,” said he.  His face came into the light again, and he leaned there on the table, watching me as earnestly as ever.

“Naturally,” he said again.  “I was going away, Mark, never to bother you nor her.  Did I know then that you loved her?  Had you ever told me?  Was I to blame for that moment when I knew I loved the girl and that she loved me?”

“No.  I never told you—­that’s true,” I said.

“And yet I knew you cared for her, Mark.  I could see that.  I saw it all those nights when you would leave me to go plodding up the hill.  That’s why I went away.”

“Why did you go away?” I cried.  “You went to see the world and make money——­”

“I went because I loved the girl and you did, too,” said Tim.  And looking into those quiet eyes, I knew that he spoke the truth and I had been blind all this time.  “Weston knew it,” he went on.  “He saw it from the first.  That’s why he helped me.”

“You are not at all an egotist,” I sneered, trying to bear up against him.

“Entirely so,” he said calmly.  “I even thought that I might win, Mark.  But then I had so much and you so little chance, I went away to forget.  Weston knew that.  He knew, too, that there was no Edith Parker.”

“And what has Edith Parker to do with all this?” I asked more gently, for he was breaking down my barriers.

“She might have done much for you had I not come back when Weston was shot.  Couldn’t you see, Mark, how angry Mary was with me for forgetting her?  But Weston knew it.  And that night—­that minute—­I only wanted to explain to Mary, and she saw it all, Mark, and I saw it all—­and we forgot.  Then she told me of you.”

“She told you rather late,” said I.

“But she would have kept her promise.  Couldn’t you forgive her, Mark, for that one moment of forgetting?  It was just one moment, and I left her then forever.  We thought you’d never know.”

“And thinking that, you came whistling down the road that night,” I sneered.  “You came whistling like a man mightily pleased with his conquest—­or, perhaps you sang so gayly from sheer joy in your own goodness.  It seems to me at times like that a man would——­”

“A man would whistle a bit for courage,” Tim interrupted.  “Couldn’t he do that, Mark?  Couldn’t he go away with his head up and face set, or must he totter along and wail simply because he is doing a fair thing that any man would do?”

“Why, in Heaven’s name, couldn’t you keep her for yourself?” I cried, pounding the floor with my crutch.