“Will you promise that if you ever want help—­money help—­you will ask me?  I shall have more money every year, for I shall never spend my income.”

“I shall not want help,” he returned, quietly.  “But though it is not likely we shall meet again, believe me I shall always be glad to know you are well and happy.  Let this painful conversation be the last we have on this subject.  For my part, I grant you plenary absolution.”

“You are good and generous; you are wise too; your judgment constrains me.  Yet I hope I shall never see you again.  It is too humiliating to meet your eyes.”  She spoke brokenly as she tied the white veil closely over her face.

“Nevertheless we part friends,” said Errington, and held out his hand.  She put hers in it.  He felt how it trembled, and held it an instant with a friendly pressure.  Then he opened the door and followed her to the entrance, where he bowed low as she passed out.

Errington returned at once to his writing-table and his calculations.  He took up his pen, but he did not begin to write.  He leaned back in his chair and fell into an interesting train of thought.  What an extraordinary mad proceeding it was of that girl to conceal the will!  It was strangely unprincipled.  “How impossible it is to trust a person who acts from impulse!  The difference between masculine and feminine character is immense.  No man with a grain of honor in him would have done what she did; only some dastardly hound who could cheat at cards.  And she—­somehow she seems a pure good woman in spite of all.  I suppose in a woman’s sensitive and weaker nature good and evil are less distinct, more shaded into each other.  After all, I think I would trust my life to the word of this daring law-breaker.”  And Errington recalled the expressive tones of her voice, surprised to feel again the strange thrill which shivered through him when she had looked straight into his eyes, her own aglow with momentary defiance, and said, “Had it to be done again, I’d do it!” He had never been brought face to face with real emotion before.  He knew such a thing existed; that it led like most things to good and to evil; that it was exceedingly useful to poets, who often touched him, and to actors, who did not; but in real every-day life he had rarely, if ever, seen it.  The people with whom he associated were rich, well born, well trained; a crumpled rose leaf here and there was the worst trouble in their easy, conventional, luxurious lives.  Of course he had met men on the road to ruin who swore and drank and gambled and generally disgraced themselves.  Such cases, however, did not affect him much; he only touched such characters with moral tongs.  Now this delicate, refined girl had humbled herself before him.  Her sweet varying tones, her moist glowing eyes, the indescribable tremulous earnestness which was the undertone of all she said, her determined efforts for self-command, made a deep impression on him.  Was she right when she said that from him “wisdom by one entrance was quite shut out?” At all events he felt, though he did not consciously acknowledge it even to himself, that this impulsive, inexperienced girl, whom he strove to look down upon from the unsullied heights of his own integrity, had revealed to him something of life’s inner core which had hitherto been hidden from his sight.