Joe, discovered, grinned sheepishly.

“Thought that looked like your back,” he said.  “Nice evening for a walk, isn’t it?”

“Let me look at you, Joe,” said Willy Cameron.  “You look strange to me.  Ah, now I have it.  You look like a comet without a tail.  Where’s the family?”

“Making taffy.  How—­is Edith?”

“Doing nicely.”  He avoided the boy’s eyes.

“I guess I’d better tell you.  Dan’s told me about her.  I—­” Joe hesitated.  Then:  “She never seemed like that sort of a girl,” he finished, bitterly.

“She isn’t that sort of girl, Joe.”

“She did it.  How could a fellow know she wouldn’t do it again?”

“She has had a pretty sad sort of lesson.”

Joe, his real business forgotten, walked on with eyes down and shoulders drooping.

“I might as well finish with it,” he said, “now I’ve started.  I’ve always been crazy about her.  Of course now—­I haven’t slept for two nights.”

“I think it’s rather like this, Joe,” Willy Cameron said, after a pause.  “We are not one person, really.  We are all two or three people, and all different.  We are bad and good, depending on which of us is the strongest at the time, and now and then we pay so much for the bad we do that we bury that part.  That’s what has happened to Edith.  Unless, of course,” he added, “we go on convincing her that she is still the thing she doesn’t want to be.”

“I’d like to kill the man,” Joe said.  But after a little, as they neared the edge of the park, he looked up.

“You mean, go on as if nothing had happened?”

“Precisely,” said Willy Cameron, “as though nothing had happened.”

CHAPTER XLIII

The atmosphere of the Cardew house was subtly changed and very friendly.  Willy Cameron found himself received as an old friend, with no tendency to forget the service he had rendered, or that, in their darkest hour, he had been one of them.

To his surprise Pink Denslow was there, and he saw at once that Pink had been telling them of the night at the farm house.  Pink was himself again, save for a small shaved place at the back of his head, covered with plaster.

“I’ve told them, Cameron,” he said.  “If I could only tell it generally I’d be the most popular man in the city, at dinners.”

“Pair of young fools,” old Anthony muttered, with his sardonic smile.  But in his hand-clasp, as in Howard’s, there was warmth and a sort of envy, envy of youth and the adventurous spirit of youth.

Lily was very quiet.  The story had meant more to her than to the others.  She had more nearly understood Pink’s reference to the sealed envelope Willy Cameron had left, and the help sent by Edith Boyd.  She connected that with Louis Akers, and from that to Akers’ threat against Cameron was only a step.  She was frightened and somewhat resentful, that this other girl should have saved him from a revenge that she knew was directed at herself.  That she, who had brought this thing about, had sat quietly at home while another woman, a woman who loved him, had saved him.