“What?”

“Unless you call it so for her to say that she wanted to own up to me, because she could have no rest till she had done so; she couldn’t put it behind her till she had acknowledged it; she couldn’t work; she couldn’t get well.”

He saw his mother trying to consider it fairly, and in response he renewed his own resolution not to make himself the girl’s advocate with her, but to continue the dispassionate historian of the case.  At the same time his memory was filled with the vision of how she had done and said the things he was telling, with what pathos, with what grace, with what beauty in her appeal.  He saw the tears that came into her eyes at times and that she indignantly repressed as she hurried on in the confession which she was voluntarily making, for there was no outward stress upon her to say anything.  He felt again the charm of the situation, the sort of warmth and intimacy, but he resolved not to let that feeling offset the impartiality of his story.

“No, I don’t say she threw herself on your mercy,” his mother said, finally.  “She needn’t have told you anything.”

“Except for the reason she gave—­that she couldn’t make a start for herself till she had done so.  And she has got her own way to make; she is poor.  Of course, you may say her motive was an obsession, and not a reason.”

“There’s reality in it, whatever it is; it’s a genuine motive,” Mrs. Verrian conceded.

“I think so,” Verrian said, in a voice which he tried to keep from sounding too grateful.

Apparently his mother did not find it so.  She asked, “What had been the matter with her, did she say?”

“In her long sickness?  Oh!  A nervous fever of some sort.”

“From worrying about that experience?”

Verrian reluctantly admitted, “She said it made her want to die.  I don’t suppose we can quite realize—­”

“We needn’t believe everything she said to realize that she suffered.  But girls exaggerate their sufferings.  I suppose you told her not to think of it any more?”

Verrian gave an odd laugh.  “Well, not unconditionally.  I tried to give her my point of view.  And I stipulated that she should tell Jerusha Brown all about it, and keep her from having a nervous fever, too.”

“That was right.  You must see that even cowardice couldn’t excuse her selfishness in letting that girl take all the chances.”

“And I’m afraid I was not very unselfish myself in my stipulations,” Verrian said, with another laugh.  “I think that I wanted to stand well with the postmaster.”

There was a note of cynical ease in this which Mrs. Verrian found morally some octaves lower than the pitch of her son’s habitual seriousness in what concerned himself, but she could not make it a censure to him.  “And you were able to reassure her, so that she needn’t think of it any more?”

“What would you have wished me to do?” he returned, dryly.  “Don’t you think she had suffered enough?”