"It is you who do not know!" he cried. "But you shall--everything--all my cowardly baseness!" The confession burst from him in a torrent of self-denunciation--"That trip to town, when we went to fetch them, I lied to you about those bridge plans. It was not true that I found them. He handed them to me. He took no receipt. I looked at them and saw how wonderful they were. I stole them. My father had threatened to cast me off if I did not do something worth while. I was desperate. So I stole your brother's plans. I copied them--" "You know about Tom!" she interrupted. "But of course. You saw me tell him, there at the ravine." "I saw you put your arms about his neck and kiss him; but I did not hear--I did not see the truth. I believed--that is the worst of it all--I believed it possible that you--_you_--!... That devil Gowan.... But that is no excuse. Had I not already doubted you.... And I went down--down into hell, with only one purpose--to make certain that he never should come up again!" "Dear Christ!" whispered the girl--"Dear Christ! He has gone mad!" "No, Isobel," he said, his voice slow and dead with the calm of utter despair, "I am not mad. I have never been mad except for a little while after you put your arms about his neck. No--For years I was a fool, a profligate fool, wasting my life as I wasted all those thousands of dollars that I had not earned. I turned thief--a despicable sneak thief. At last the dirty crime found me out. I received a small share of the punishment that I deserved. Then you took me in--without question--treated me as a man. God knows I tried to be one!" "You were!--you are!" she broke in. "This is all a mistake--a cruel, hideous mistake!" "I tried to go," he went on unflinchingly. "You urged me to stay. I was weak. I could not force myself to leave you." "Because--because!" she murmured. "All the more reason why I should have gone," he replied. "But I was weak, unfit. I lied to you and won your pity. You gave me the chance to stay and prove myself what I am. Down there, when he told me what I should have guessed--what I must have guessed had not my own baseness blinded me to the truth--when he told me he was your brother, I saw myself, my real self,--my shriveled, black, hellish soul. Now you see why I must go down again. I can never make reparation for what I have done. But I can at least go down to him." "You take all the blame on yourself!" she protested. "What if I had confessed my secret, there at the first, when Tom sprang down from the car and I knew him." "If you had told, then I should not have been tempted to doubt you, and I should have gone on, it might have been forever, with that lie and that theft between us--and I should not have been forced to see, as I now see, my absolute unworthiness of you."