That was hardest of all to believe--most difficult to visualize--and he would not give it full credence until he had reached out behind him in the dark and found the bit of a cloak which, slipping from her shoulders, become entangled in his stumbling feet and brought him crashing to his knees. The feel of that rough cloth beneath his hand was more than enough to convince him, and swiftly, unreasonably, the old bitter tide of resentment began to creep back upon him--bitter resentment of her quick judgment of him, which like that of the village, had condemned in the years that were past, even without a hearing. "She thought," he muttered slowly aloud to himself, "she thought I had--" He left the sentence unfinished to drift off into a long brooding silence; and then, many minutes later: "She didn't even wait to ask--to see--to let me tell her----" One hand went tentatively to the point of his chin--his old, vaguely preoccupied trick of a gesture--and the wet touch of that open wound helped to bring him back to himself. A moment longer he sat, trying to make out the stained figures that were invisible even though he held them a scant few inches from his eyes, before he rose, stretching his legs in experimental doubt at first, and passed inside. And once more he stood before the square patch of mirror on the wall, with the small black-chimneyed lamp lifted high in one hand, just as he had stood earlier that same night, and scanned his own face. All trace of resentment left his eyes as he realized the ghastly pallor of those features--all the ragged horror of that oozing welt which he had only half seen in that first moment when he was clinging to consciousness with clenched teeth. It was not nice to look at, and the light that replaced that sudden flare of bitterness was so new that he did not even recognize it himself at first. It was a clearer, steadier, surer thing than he had ever known them to reflect before; all hint of lost-dog sophistication was gone; even the smile that touched his thin, pain-straightened lips was different somehow. It was just as whimsical as before, and just as half-mirthless--gentle as it always had been whenever he thought at all of her--but there was no wistful hunger left in it, and little of boyishness, and nothing of lurking self-doubt. "Why, she couldn't have known," he went on then, still murmuring aloud. "She couldn't have been expected to believe anything else. I--I'm not much to look at--just now." He even forgot that he had tried to follow her--forgot that her cloak had thrown him sprawling in the doorway. "I ought to have told her," he condemned himself. "I shouldn't have let her go--not like that." In the fullness of this new certainty of self that was setting his pulses hammering, he even turned toward the sleeping town, thickly blanketed by the shadows in the valley, in a sudden boyish burst of generosity.