“I do not want you to know my name.  You must promise to keep from knowing.  It is all I ask.”

“Will you let me tell you—­mine?”

“No! no!” Joan put up her hands as if to ward off something tangible.

“I only meant”—­Raymond dropped his eyes—­“that there isn’t anything under heaven I wouldn’t do to prove to you my sense of remorse.  I thought if you knew you might call upon me some day to prove myself.  I’m bungling, I know, but I wish I could make you understand how I feel.”

“I do.”  And now Joan got up rather unsteadily.  “And some day—­I—­I may call upon you—­for—­for I have known your name—­always!”

“What!”

“Please—­forgive me.  I was taking an advantage—­but it did not seem to matter then, and I must keep the advantage now—­for your sake as well as mine.  And now, before we say good-bye, I want to tell you that I know you are going to have your ideals again.  You will try to get them back, won’t you?”

“I will get them back, yes!  I only lost them when the devil in me drove me mad.”

“And bye and bye, try to believe that although one cannot make the unreal real, still there are some foolish people that think they can—­and be kind to such people.  Help them, do not hurt them.”

“Will you—­take my hand?” Raymond stretched his own forth.

“Why—­of course—­and tell you that I am glad, oh, so glad because—­you have come back!  Glad because it was I not another who saw that other you—­for I can forget it!”

“And—­and we are—­to see each other some day?” This came hopefully.  “Some day—­as we left ourselves—­back before this?”

“Some day—­some day?  Perhaps.  If we do—­we will understand better than we did then.”

“Yes.  We’ll understand some things.”

Raymond bent and touched Joan’s hand with his lips and went quickly from the room.

He was conscious of passing, on the stairs, a wet and draggled young woman, but he did not pause to see the frightened look she cast upon him.

A moment later Joan raised her head from the pillow on which she was weeping the weakest—­and the strongest—­tears of her life.

“Oh!  Pat,” she sobbed.  “Oh!  Pat.”

Patricia came to the couch and sat down.  She was thinking fast and hard.  Life had not been make-believe to Patricia; she had builded whatever towers had been hers with hard facts.

She drew wrong and bitter conclusions now—­but she dealt with them divinely.

“You poor kid,” she whispered, “and I left you—­to this.  I!  Joan, I told you not to trust men.  It’s when you trust them that you get hurt.