“Unhappily, I do know,” she interrupted.  “If I did not, I might listen to you with better patience.”

“It did look pretty bad,” he confessed.  “And that’s what I wanted to say; it looked a great deal worse than it was, you know.”

“I don’t know,” she retorted.

“You are tangling me,” he said, gaining something in self-possession under the flick of the whip.  “First you say you know, and then you say you don’t know.  Which is which?”

“If you are flippant I shall go in,” she threatened.  “There are things that not even the most loyal friendship can condone.”

“That’s the difference between friendship and love,” he asserted.  “I believe I’d enjoy a little more real confidence and a little less of the dutiful kind of loyalty.”

“You ask too much,” she said, quite coolly.  “Forgiveness implies penitence and continued good behavior.”

“No, it doesn’t, anything of the kind,” he denied, matching her tone.  “That is the purely pagan point of view, and you are barred from taking it.  You are bound to consider the motive.”

“I am bound to believe what I see with my own eyes,” she rejoined.  “Perhaps you can make it appear that seeing is not believing.”

“Of course I can’t, if you take that attitude,” he complained.  And then he said irritably:  “You talk about friendship!  You don’t know the meaning of the word!”

“If I didn’t, I should hardly be here at this moment,” she suggested.  “You don’t seem to apprehend to what degrading depths you have sunk.”

His sins in the business field rose before him accusingly and prompted his reply.

“Yes, I do; but that is another matter.  We were speaking of what you saw this evening.  Will you let me try to explain?”

“Yes, if you will tell the plain truth.”

“Lacking imagination, I can’t do anything else.  Nan has had a falling-out with the old scamp of a moonshiner who calls himself her father.  She came to me for help, and broke down in the midst of telling me about it.  I can’t stand a woman’s crying any better than other men.”

The slate-blue eyes were transfixing him.

“And that was all—­absolutely all, Tom?”

“I don’t lie—­to you,” he said briefly.

She gave him her hand with an impulsive return to the old comradeship.  “I believe you, Tom, in the face of all the—­the unlikelinesses.  But please don’t try me again.  After what has happened—­” she stopped in deference to something in his eyes, half anger, half bewilderment, or a most skilful simulation of both.

“Go on,” he said; “tell me what has happened.  I seem to have missed something.”

“No,” she said, with sudden gravity.  “I don’t want to be your accuser or your confessor; and if you should try to prevaricate, I should hate you!”

“There is nothing for me to confess to you, Ardea,” he said soberly, still holding the hand she had given him.  “You have known the worst of me, always and all along, I think.”