"I wish you would be as frank with me as I am with you," she said. "A woman's sympathy counts for much sometimes. Forgive me for saying that you puzzle me, and one isn't puzzled where one isn't interested. You don't convey the impression of a man with a discreditable career behind him, and from the accepted accounts of your position your prospects are assured from a worldly point of view. A month ago I thought--I hoped--that we were going to be friends. We had begun to exchange confidences in a mild sort of way. Will you not confide in me now more fully, and tell me if there is anything in which I can help?" In that moment, listening to her sweet proffer of womanly aid, Leslie suffered the most exquisite torture. This was the girl whom he had lightly condemned to a fate worse than death--a fate which he had pledged himself to compass by deceitfully gaining her love. He turned and looked at her, and he knew that the priceless guerdon which he had played for as a mere counter in a disgraceful game had been won. And now that it was his--now that he valued it for its own sake more than all the treasures in the world--he could not take it. His reawakened sense of honour forbade him to think of such desecration. How could he, wastrel and pauper, have aspired to this queenly maiden, even if his soul had not been soiled by the memory of his infamous bargain? "I am not worthy one passing thought from you--still less to give you my confidence," he faltered. "Confidence!" he went on, with something like a groan of anguish. "Why, I would rather lose the power of speech for ever than befoul your ears with the record of my shame." Her eyes, like twin pools of shining radiance, were searching his face. "That is for me to judge," she said softly. "But I do not, on second thoughts, ask you for your confidence, Mr. Chermside. I have faith in my instinct. I do not believe that you have done anything really base--whatever, perhaps, after sore temptation, you may have contemplated. You would have stopped short when you realized that you were on the brink of an evil deed. And--and if you hadn't stopped short I--well, I, perhaps, should have tried to make allowances. So, if you cannot give me your confidence, at least let me give you my help." "Help?" came the man's sobbing cry, as the blood surged into his brain, and all barriers of conscience, expedience, and common-sense were swept away in a whirlpool of riotous passion--"it is your love I want, my darling. The love of such as you means not only help but regeneration, life itself, to such as I." By the great laws that govern us, these things happen so, and the love of Leslie Chermside and Violet Maynard had passed beyond the region of words and of petty sophistries. They were locked in each other's arms, eye to eye and lip to lip, at that moment of glad surrender in the solitude of the rose garden--a solitude that was not entirely solitary.