“I will be frank with you, Piers,” said Daniel Otway, as he sat by the fireside in his shabby lodgings, his feet on the fender, a cigarette between his fingers.  He looked yellow and dried up; shivered now and then, and had a troublesome cough.  “If I could afford to be generous, I would be; I should enjoy it.  It’s one of the worst evils of poverty, that a man can seldom obey the promptings of his better self.  I can’t give you these letters; can’t afford to do so.  You have glanced through them; you see they really are what I said.  The question is, what are they worth to you?”

Piers looked at the threadbare carpet, reflected, spoke.

“I’ll give you fifty pounds.”

A smile crept from the corners of Daniel’s shrivelled lips to his bloodshot eye.

“Why are you so anxious to have them,” he said, “I don’t know and don’t ask.  But if they are worth fifty to you, they are worth more.  You shall have them for two hundred.”

And at this figure the bundle of letters eventually changed hands.  It was a serious drain on Piers Otway’s resources, but he could not bargain long, the talk sickened him.  And when the letters were in his possession, he felt a joy which had no equivalent in terms of cash.

He said to himself that he had bought them for Olga.  In a measure, of course, for all who would be relieved by knowing that Mrs. Hannaford had told the truth; but first and foremost for Olga.  On Olga he kept his thoughts.  He was persuading himself that in her he saw his heart’s desire.

For Piers Otway was one of those men who cannot live without a woman’s image to worship.  Irene Derwent being now veiled from him, he turned to another beautiful face, in whose eyes the familiar light of friendship seemed to be changing, softening.  Ambition had misled him; not his to triumph on the heights of glorious passion; for him a humbler happiness a calmer love.  Yet he would not have been Piers Otway had this mood contented him.  On the second day of his dreaming about Olga, she began to shine before his imagination in no pale light.  He mused upon her features till they became the ideal beauty; he clad her, body and soul, in all the riches of love’s treasure-house; she was at length his crowned lady, his perfect vision of delight.

With such thoughts had he sat by Mrs. Hannaford, at the meeting which was to be their last.  He was about to utter them, when she spoke Olga’s name.  “In you she will always have a friend?  If the worst happens——?” And when he asked, “May I hope that she would some day let me be more than that?” the glow of joy on that stricken face, the cry of rapture, the hand held to him, stirred him so deeply that his old love-longing seemed a boyish fantasy.  “Oh, you have made me happy!  You have blotted out all my follies and sufferings!” Then the poor tortured mind lost itself.