Tregarvon glanced at his watch. There were other things to be said--many of them, but a suddenly recrudescent sense of the fitness of things told him that the moment was unauspicious. “I suppose I’ll have to consider Hartridge and take him back to Highmount,” he offered. Then he added quite irrelevantly: “He’s in love with you, too. Speaking of accomplices, how much or how little did he have to do with the bushwhacking?” “Nothing at all. It was only on the day of the explosion that he learned that Richard had come back, and was hiding with the McNabbs in the ‘Pocket,’ and heard, through Sill McNabb, that something was going to happen that night at your drilling plant. He suspected Richard at once, and went over to try to prevent the happening. Then your men caught Morgan McNabb, and Professor Billy hardly knew what to do. He guessed that Tryon had come over here after you and Mr. Carfax, and when you took father back with you he was afraid Morgan would be made to confess, and so make a bad matter infinitely worse. His idea in lighting the leaf fire was to give Morgan McNabb a chance to escape. Of course, he supposed the dynamite had been removed.” “It has been a tragedy of errors from the beginning,” said Tregarvon soberly. “But I am going to expiate my part of it. Has Poictiers told you anything about my plans?” “No.” “I made them while I was lying in bed in the old office-building at Coalville, trying to get well enough to crawl out and take hold with my hands. It came to me then what an egregious ass I had made of myself, all the way round. I had blundered in ahead of Poictiers and didn’t have sense enough even to suspect it; and I had deliberately killed any little regard you might have had for me by showing myself up as a man who would make love to one woman while he was engaged to another. I was eaten up with shame, Richardia, and I am yet.” “It hurt me; I think you will never know how much it hurt,” she said slowly. “A man asks utter and absolute loyalty of the woman he loves.” “And the woman can ask no less of the man, you would say. That is true. I am no defender of the double standard; still less an apologist for my sex. I have only one excuse, Richardia; it wasn’t merely propinquity--as you and Poictiers seemed to think. I had never known what love was until I met you. Elizabeth is going to marry Poictiers, and you must believe me when I say that I think just as much of her--and in the same way--as I did before. But let that pass. I had found my coal mine, and had lost pretty nearly everything else, including my own self-respect. You were lost to me; doubly lost, as I thought then; so it seemed that the only thing for me to do was to set the Ocoee house in order, and after that was done to go away and try to forget.” “You are still meaning to go away?”