"This isn't what I meant to say, any of it;" he sighed angrily. "It's just what I meant _not_ to say--confound it! You've done gloriously; you've played the thing through to perfection; you've made an inimitable success of it; but Wallencamp doesn't offer scope wide enough for your powers. I offer you a field hitherto untilled, left to the wandering winds and the birds of the air, extensive enough in its forlorn iniquity, I assure you, to engage your patient and continued efforts. It may prove productive of good results yet, who knows? Is it my fault that I didn't know you sooner?" I did not mistake the change in Mr. Rollin's tone, nor the meaning in his eyes, but as we stood there by the window, in the full moonlight, I caught a glimpse of another face outside, vanishing up the lane--almost like a ghostly apparition it seemed to me--the handsome pale young face. I guessed instinctively whose it was, and suffered a pang of sharp, unconfessed pain, while the fisherman was murmuring in my ear. "Don't speak to me again of missions!" I cried with the strong and tragic air of consciously blighted aspirations. "I shall go on no more missions, great or small. It is very true what you have tried so delicately to intimate. I was not fit for the work I undertook to do. I have only made mistakes all the way along. Possibly I have been only 'playing a part.' What does it amount to, indeed! What does it amount to!" "Heavens!" said Mr. Rollin; "play a part, by all means; never be sincere in anything you do. I never tried it but once, and I've made a desperate mess of it. Can't you understand that what I said was only in the purest sort of self-defence? You weigh my words so nicely. Well, you are considerate enough, God knows, of those dirty brats and ignorant louts--coddling that girl, Rebecca, who is a good-hearted creature enough, but not fit for respectable people to touch their hands to; and associating with such conceited boors as that George Olver, and that grinning clown, Harvey, and that poor fool, Lovell Barlow, and that what-d'ye-call him--that fiddling young devil with the bird-like name----" Mr. Rollin stopped suddenly. "You might make allowances for a man in a passion," he said; "instead of dissecting his words in that cold-blooded way." "I had no notion of dissecting your words," I said, provoked into a desperate honesty; "I believe them, as a whole, to be utterly false." "From the very beginning," said Mr. Rollin; "thank you; so I can begin all over again; meanwhile,--you will forgive me? Imagine that I'm one of those dirty little beggars that go to school to you. If one of them should come to you and say that he was sorry?--" "I should only be intensely surprised," I said; "they never do such things." "Then I have a superior claim on your clemency," said the fisherman; "for I am sorry and humiliate my soul to the lowest depths of the confessional." It was the voice of the plausible, easy-going fisherman again.