"The proud and upright one of never having done me any conscious wrong." "But when I left you, rejected you, threw you off--" "That was not done to me, but to the man you supposed me to be--the man who had been proved to you a scoundrel, by such proof as any one would have deemed you mad to doubt." She looked at him somewhat timidly. "You are generous indeed," she said. "I am no whit more than just. You were absolutely warranted in such a course toward me. What I long to do--what I have crossed the world in the hope of doing--is to get you to forgive yourself, to free yourself of a hallucination which is casting a needless shadow on your life." "Oh, you are good--good!" she said. "I never knew so kind a heart. Therefore must my unending misery be the greater that I have once wounded it." "That consciousness should have no sting for you hereafter. You did it in utter ignorance. I cannot claim that I was half so ignorant in my wrong toward you. But surely we may remember that we have once been friends, and so we may feel that there is full and free forgiveness between us before we part." She did not speak. That last word had pierced too deeply to her heart. "You do forgive me--do you not?" he said, as if he misunderstood her silence. "I thank you--I bless you--I seek _your_ forgiveness," she said. At these last words he smiled--a smile that had a certain bitterness in it. Then suddenly his face became rigidly grave. "If I had not given you my forgiveness, long ago," he said, "I should like to offer it to you now, at a price. I wish to God that I could." "What do you mean?" she said, a sweet perplexity upon her face. "What price have I to pay for anything?" "Ah, there it is! It may seem brutal of me to put a literal construction upon what you have used as a figure of speech, but let the truth come out. You are poor, unprotected, alone, and you ask me to go and leave you so! God knows it is little enough that I have it in my power to do, but the possession of money would enable you at least to live as it becomes you to live. I do not speak of your title--it is not what you are called, but what you are, that I have in mind. If you had money, even the small income which I so desire that you shall accept, your life would be different." But Bettina looked away from him, and shook her head in the gentle negation which he knew to be so final. "How would my life be different?" she said. "You could make it so." "In what way?" "You could travel, for one thing." "I do not want to travel. I desired it once, and I got my wish. But with it came a wretchedness that all the travelling in the world could not carry me away from." "Then what is to be your life?" "What you see it now. I do not wish to change it for any other. I have tried the world and its rewards. There is nothing in them." Her tone of absolute, unexpectant decision maddened him.