Then he stopped short in the middle of the lane. What little color the heat had brought into his cheeks died away. He looked wildly around, as though half inclined to leap the gray-stone wall and vanish in the tangled wilderness beyond. Yet there was nothing more alarming in the way than a smartly turned-out victoria descending the hill toward him, and, leaning back among the cushions, a tired-looking woman in a white dress and hat with pink roses. Almost at the same moment she saw him, and, leaning forward, she stopped the carriage. To his amazement she stepped lightly out, gave the man an order, and waited for him in the shade of a great oak tree which overhung the road. He ground his teeth together and advanced to meet her steadily. She greeted him with her old quiet smile. She, too, he thought, was looking pale and listless. "I'm so glad to see you. Do you mind resting your bicycle somewhere and coming into the shade? I will not keep you very long." He obeyed her in silence. Words seemed difficult to him just then. They stood in the shadow of the trees which hung over from the wood. She lowered her parasol and seemed for a moment intent upon studying the pattern of the filmy lace. The man's heart beat out like a sledge hammer. Yet he stood there, slowly mastering his emotion, and it was the woman who found speech so difficult. "I am going to tell you something," she said at last, "which a few days ago I was very sure that I would never tell you." She pauses. He remains speechless, his eyes fastened upon her. "Go on." "One afternoon when you were away I had a fancy to look at your cottage. I came--and found someone there. I questioned the girl. She was a friend of yours, she said. She was confused; what she said seemed incapable of bearing more than one interpretation. I accepted the inference--and that afternoon there was plain speaking--on the lawn." He was no longer steady on his feet, and in his ears was the rushing of strange sounds, trees and sky were mixed up together. "You believed--that?" he gasped. "I judged you," she answered, "by the standard of a world which I believed to be lower than yours. Remember, too, that in many ways I knew so little of you. Different classes of society regard the same thing from such different points of view. Yes, I judged you. I want your forgiveness." He looked at her wildly. "What infernal sophistry," he cried. "What is sin in your world is sin in mine!" "Mind," she continued drearily, "I do not say that even without this I could have answered you differently."