Redding put his arm around her, and together they stood looking down into the glowing embers.

“Tell me about it, little girl; what have you heard?” he asked.

She hesitated.  “It wasn’t true what they said.  I knew it wasn’t true, but they had no right to say it.”

“Well, let’s hear it, anyway.  What was it?”

“Some people were here last night from New Orleans; they asked if I knew you—­said they knew you and Dick the year you spent there.”

“Well?” said Redding.

Lucy evidently found it difficult to continue.  “They said some horrid things then, just because you were Dick’s friend.”

“What were they, Lucy?”

“They told me that you were both as wild as could be; that your reputation was no better than his; that—­forgive me, Robert, for even repeating it.  It made me very angry, and I told them it was not true—­not a word of it; that it was all Dick’s fault; that he—­”

“Lucy,” interrupted Redding, peremptorily, “wait until you hear me!  I have never lied to you about anything, and I will not stoop to it now.  Four years ago, when those people knew me, I was just what they said.  Dick Harris and I went to New Orleans straight from college.  Neither of us had a home or people to care about us, so we went in for a good time.  At the end of the year I was sick of it all, braced up, and came here.  Poor Dick, he kept on.”

At his first words the color had left Lucy’s face, and she had slipped to the opposite side of the fire, and stood watching him with horrified eyes.

“But you were never like Dick!” she protested.

“Yes,” he continued passionately, “and but for God’s help I should be like him still.  It was an awful pull, and Heaven only knows how I struggled.  I never quite saw the use of it all, until I met you six months ago; then I realized that the past four years had been given me in which to make a man of myself.”

As he finished speaking he saw, for the first time, that Lucy was crying.  He sprang forward, but she shrank away.  “No, no, don’t touch me!  I’m so terribly disappointed, and hurt, and—­stunned.”

“But you surely don’t love me the less for having conquered these things in the past?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said, with a sob.  “I honored and idealized you, Robert I can never think of you as being other than you are now.”

“But why should you?” he pleaded.  “It was only one year out of my life; too much, it’s true, but I have atoned for it with all my might.”

The intensity and earnestness of his voice were beginning to influence her.  She was very young, with the stern, uncompromising standards of girlhood; life was black or white to her, and time had not yet filled in the canvas with the myriad grays that blend into one another until all lines are effaced, and only the Master Artist knows the boundaries.

She looked up through her tears.  “I’ll try to forgive you,” she said, tremulously; “but you must promise to give up your friendship for Dick Harris.”