"Only gone to the spring after water," replied the woman, shortly. "Why didn't you git up and git it for her?" "I would if I had known," he muttered, and he escaped from the intolerable air of the room to the door, where he met Annie, fresh and rosy from her morning walk and her toilet at the brook that brawled down the ravine. "Mr. Gregory, you are certainly ill," she exclaimed. "I am so sorry it has all happened!" He looked at her wonderingly, and then said, "You appear as if nothing had happened. I am ill, Miss Walton, and I wish I were dead. You can not feel toward me half the contempt I have for myself." "Now, honestly, Mr. Gregory, I have no contempt for you at all." He turned away and shook his head dejectedly. "But I mean what I say," she continued, earnestly. "Then it is your goodness, and not my desert." "As I told you last night, so again I sincerely say, I think I understand you better than you do yourself." "You are mistaken," he answered, with gloomy emphasis. "Your intuitions are quick, I admit. I have never known your equal in that respect. But there are some things I am glad to think you never can understand. You can never know what a proud man suffers when he has utterly lost hope and self-respect. Though I acted so mean a part myself, I can still appreciate your nobleness, courage, and fidelity to conscience. I thought such heroism belonged only to the past." "Mr. Gregory, I wish I could make you understand me," said Annie, with real distress in her tone. "I am not brave; I was more afraid than you. Indeed, I was in an agony of fear. I refused that man's demand because I was compelled to. If you looked at things as I do, you would have done the same." "Please say no more, Miss Walton," said he, his face distorted by an expression of intense self-loathing. "Do not try to palliate my course. I would much rather you would call my cowardly selfishness and lack of principle by their right names. The best thing I can do for the world is to get out of it, and from present feelings, this 'good-riddance' will soon occur. Will you excuse me if I sit down?" and he sank upon the door-step in utter weakness. Annie had placed her pail of water on the door-step and forgotten it in her wish to cheer and help this bitterly wounded spirit. "Mr. Gregory," she said, earnestly, "you are indeed ill in body and mind, and you take a wrong and morbid view of everything. My heart aches to show you how complete and perfect a remedy there is for all this. It almost seems as if you were dying from thirst with that brook yonder running--" "There is no remedy for me," interrupted he, almost harshly. Then he added in a weary tone, pressing his hand on his throbbing brow, "Forgive me, Miss Walton; you see what I am. Please waste no more thought on me." "If yer want any breakfast to-day, yer better bring that water," called the old woman from within. Annie gave him a troubled, anxious look, and then silently carried in the pail.