Now that he was launched, March rather enjoyed letting himself go.  He did not know what he should say to Mrs. March when he came to confess having told Burnamy everything before she got a chance at him; he pushed on recklessly, upon the principle, which probably will not hold in morals, that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.  “I have a message for you from Mr. Stoller.”

“For me?” Burnamy gasped.

“I’ve been wondering how I should put it, for I hadn’t expected to see you.  But it’s simply this:  he wants you to know—­and he seemed to want me to know—­that he doesn’t hold you accountable in the way he did.  He’s thought it all over, and he’s decided that he had no right to expect you to save him from his own ignorance where he was making a show of knowledge.  As he said, he doesn’t choose to plead the baby act.  He says that you’re all right, and your place on the paper is open to you.”

Burnamy had not been very prompt before, but now he seemed braced for instant response.  “I think he’s wrong,” he said, so harshly that the people at the next table looked round.  “His feeling as he does has nothing to do with the fact, and it doesn’t let me out.”

March would have liked to take him in his arms; he merely said, “I think you’re quite right, as to that.  But there’s such a thing as forgiveness, you know.  It doesn’t change the nature of what you’ve done; but as far as the sufferer from it is concerned, it annuls it.”

“Yes, I understand that.  But I can’t accept his forgiveness if I hate him.”

“But perhaps you won’t always hate him.  Some day you may have a chance to do him a good turn.  It’s rather banale; but there doesn’t seem any other way.  Well, I have given you his message.  Are you going with me to get that poem?”

When March had given Burnamy the paper at his hotel, and Burnamy had put it in his pocket, the young man said he thought he would take some coffee, and he asked March to join him in the dining-room where they had stood talking.

“No, thank you,” said the elder, “I don’t propose sitting up all night, and you’ll excuse me if I go to bed now.  It’s a little informal to leave a guest—­”

“You’re not leaving a guest!  I’m at home here.  I’m staying in this hotel too.”

March said, “Oh!” and then he added abruptly, “Good-night,” and went up stairs under the fresco of the five poets.

“Whom were you talking with below?” asked Mrs. March through the door opening into his room from hers.

“Burnamy,” he answered from within.  “He’s staying in this house.  He let me know just as I was going to turn him out for the night.  It’s one of those little uncandors of his that throw suspicion on his honesty in great things.”

“Oh!  Then you’ve been telling him,” she said, with a mental bound high above and far beyond the point.

“Everything.”

“About Stoller, too?”