"It was a mistake, that's all," he said, at last. "And that's plain. A mistake for me. But now it's all over and done with. There's nothing to be got out of this endless accusing and regret over something that couldn't be helped--helped, at least, after it was once started.... I'll always wear my hurt of it; that I know. It hurts like the devil to think I didn't--couldn't--give her the love she ought to have had. If there were any way--any possible way of reparation, ... but I suppose there isn't. Nothing except to live decently and honorably--if that's reparation. Thank God, 'tisn't as if there were any other woman mixed up in it--I haven't got that to worry me at any rate. I wonder whether a man gets his punishment for--but no, you can't help feeling, and being, and loving, just as it comes. It's this dreadful unconventionality of--not really liking--loving a person you are supposed to love that warps your judgment. And we lie about it to ourselves and to others till when we have to face the real truth we go all to pieces.... But, just the same, I'd feel so much easier if there _were_ only some way I could make it up to Ida now that she's gone. Poor Ida, poor Ida." Haldane's eyes strayed to the little, cheap desk again, and for a moment the distress of the afternoon was renewed. But he resolutely threw off the accusing mood he so feared. There was a pile of letters lying there--letters that he had had neither the time nor the heart to look into for the past week. He picked them up now with relief at finding something tangible to be done. Most of them were letters of consolation and sympathy for him from his friends and hers; the worn phrases one can so little avoid in such missives touched him with a sense of their dual ineffectuality. Other letters were addressed to Ida--commonplace messages and bills which she had not been able to open. And there was one from her mother--written evidently before she had heard of her daughter's imminent illness and death. This last Haldane laid aside until he had finished the others; and even then he looked at it long and somewhat tenderly before he opened it. "It must have come very hard to her; Ida was all she had," he considered. "It must have been very hard." He thought of the tear-stained, illegible letter Ida's mother had sent him after she had had his telegram. An illness had prevented her from coming to the funeral; and she lived so far away, somewhere in Iowa. Her heart was bleeding for _him_, she wrote. Her own loss was almost blotted out in the thought of _his_ terrible grief. He had never finished it--that letter; he could not. Such words had seemed too sacred for him to read, feeling as he did. So he had torn it up. "Ida was very good to her mother," he reflected; "at least she was conscientiously always trying to do her best by her, support her and all that. She took it awfully as a duty--but she did it."