"You have done me a priceless kindness in restoring my picture, but with it comes the hour of humiliation I always knew must sooner or later overtake me. Noel, your good opinion is so precious to me I shrink from losing it. I have dreaded your condemnation next to that of my God. You always trusted and respected me, even in what you deemed foolish monkish extremes, and yet--and yet----" "Sit down, and pull yourself together. You have fasted and prayed your starved nerves into a fit of womanish hysteria. I am no father confessor for you, and if you are not the true, loyal man I have believed you all these years, then, while you are under my roof, I prefer not to find out that you are a hypocrite." He pushed his friend back into the easy chair, and handed him a glass of chartreuse, but it was put aside. "Noel, you must hear me. After the first bitterness I shall feel relieved that you know literally all I can tell, and then you will understand many things in my life. To-day I am what I am, simply and solely in the hope of expiating the sin of my youth. Noel, the sin of my youth found me out early, and this life I lead is an attempted atonement. Do you begin to understand?" Mr. Herriott held up the sketch, and, as he struck it sharply with his fingers, his face darkened. "Whose portrait is this?" "The woman--the young girl--whose life I blighted." "Good God! Blighted? Is your villainy so black?" "I am Father Temple, vowed to celibacy, and somewhere in the wide, cruel world a wife and child of mine may have gone down to perdition because I was a coward--a vile coward, too base for a brave man to recognize. I knew you would despise me, and I kept silent as long as I could. Do you wonder?" Mr. Herriott stood over him like an avenging Viking. "You betrayed a woman? Wife, or victim of----" "Both. I married and I deserted her." "The marriage was legal--no swindling sham?" "Legal in form, though I was a minor and she a mere child." "And you ensnared her deliberately, intending to----" The priest sprang to his feet and his eyes flashed. "I loved her, and married her secretly, and intended no wrong; but before I could publicly claim her--before I was of age and dared to face my father with the fact of my marriage--I lost her. She disappeared as completely as if the ocean rolled over her." "Is this the unvarnished truth? There is nothing worse, nothing more heinous than what you have told me?" Mr. Herriott breathed quickly, as his keen, cold eyes searched severely the wan face before him. "I have told you the whole, bitter truth." "Then I have not entirely lost my friend. Now sit down; begin at the beginning of this black business, and let me try to share your load of trouble. Don't hurry--be explicit. Keep back nothing. If you intended no wrong, there must and shall be found some way to right it."