“There’s a bureau cover I started when I was at Pratt’s,” she said, as she straightened it over her knees.  “It’s a copy of an expensive one.  I never had the patience to finish it, but one of the sales-ladies there, who was an expert, told me it was pretty good:  She taught me the stitch, and I had a notion at that time I might make a little money for dresses and the theatre.  I was always clever with my hands.”

“The very thing!” he said, with hopeful emphasis.  “I’m sure I can get you plenty of it to do.  And I’ll come back in the morning.”

He gave it back to her, and as she was folding it his glance fell on a photograph in the basket.

“I kept it, I don’t know why,” he heard her say; “I didn’t have the heart to burn it.”

He started recovered himself, and rose.

“I’ll go to see the agent the first thing to-morrow,” he said.  “And then—­you’ll be ready for me?  You trust me?”

“I’d do anything for you,” was her tremulous reply.

Her disquieting, submissive smile haunted him as he roped his way down the stairs to the street, and then the face in the photograph replaced it—­the laughing eyes, the wilful, pleasure—­loving mouth he had seen in the school and college pictures of Preston Parr.

THE INSIDE OF THE CUP

By Winston Churchill

Volume 5.

XVII.  Reconstruction
XVIII.  The riddle of causation
XIX.  Mr. Goodrich becomes A partisan

CHAPTER XVII

RECONSTRUCTION

I

Life had indeed become complicated, paradoxical.  He, John Hodder, a clergyman, rector of St. John’s by virtue of not having resigned, had entered a restaurant of ill repute, had ordered champagne for an abandoned woman, and had no sense of sin when he awoke the next morning!  The devil, in the language of orthodox theology, had led him there.  He had fallen under the influence of the tempter of his youth, and all in him save the carnal had been blotted out.

More paradoxes!  If the devil had not taken possession of him and led him there, it were more than probable that he could never have succeeded in any other way in getting on a footing of friendship with this woman, Kate Marcy.  Her future, to be sure, was problematical.  Here was no simple, sentimental case he might formerly have imagined, of trusting innocence betrayed, but a mixture of good and evil, selfishness and unselfishness.  And she had, in spite of all, known the love which effaces self!  Could the disintegration, in her case, be arrested?