“You dear, good boy,” she said; but Alick never smiled at this praise. His face was as pale as Bessie’s was red, his tone as quiet as hers was hurried. For a moment the pair looked at each other, then she said: “Alick, may I trust that you will not tell Heather?” “I will tell nothing,” he answered. She put her hand into his, but he never clasped the little soft fingers. Involuntarily almost she put her lips to his and kissed him, but still the lad made no sign. Then she broke out passionately, “Don’t judge me hardly, Alick; don’t judge me till you know all.” “I do not judge you, Bessie;” he replied, “but I am very sorry;” and there came a mist before his eyes, through which he could not see her distinctly, and he turned and walked away along the corridor, feeling he had that day got his first real lesson in deceit and hypocrisy. He had believed in Bessie; he had listened to her talk; with delight and wonder she had seemed to him walking in the golden sunlight like something too good for the every-day, common, work-a-day world, and, behold! she was but a hypocrite playing in Heather’s house a double game. Yes, he knew now the world she had come from must be a wicked place, when such things as this were possible in it. He had been deceived, and straight away he thought of Delilah and Sampson, putting up his hand to his mouth the while to feel if those were really the lips Bessie had kissed. In her fear and humiliation she had offered him this bribe; when he thought of that, his anger melted away into a great flood of shame and pity, and then the lad whom this girl, his senior by nearly five years, was teaching so rapidly to be a man, turned into his own room, where, covering his face with his hands, he cried like a child. After all, he was very young and very inexperienced, and he found it hard to see the dream-castle he had built on so frail a foundation as a woman’s truth and purity levelled to the ground. There comes a time when such knowledge, as had been vouchsafed to Alick Dudley that day, provokes smiles rather than tears. When a man has arrived at the conclusion that all women are weak, that all women are frail, it is rather gratifying to his penetration than otherwise when beauty confirms this view of the question; but Alick Dudley had not commenced travelling along the road which leads to this pleasant opinion, and it was very grievous to him to find his idol had feet of clay, that she had been making a cat’s-paw of him, that the stranger and she knew more of each other than was well for either, that she had fallen in a moment so low as not to be above bribing him with a kiss.