Arnold had not taken his gaze for an instant from her gravely thoughtful eyes. He was quite pale. He looked astonishingly moved, startled, arrested. When she stopped, he said, almost at once, in a very queer voice as though it were forced out of him, "I'm not a decent man." And then, quite as though he could endure no longer her clear, steady gaze, he covered his eyes with his hand. An instant later he had sprung up and walked rapidly away out to the low marble parapet which topped the terrace. His gesture, his action had been so eloquent of surprised, intolerable pain, that Sylvia ran after him, all one quick impulse to console. "Yes, you are, Arnold; yes, you are!" she said in a low, energetic tone, "you _are_!" He made a quavering attempt to be whimsical. "I'd like to know what _you_ know about it!" he said. "I know! I _know_!" she simply repeated. He faced her in an exasperated shame. "Why, a girl like you can no more know what's done by a man like me ..." his lips twitched in a moral nausea. "Oh ... what you've _done_ ..." said Sylvia ... "it's what you are!" "What I _am_," repeated Arnold bitterly. "If I were worth my salt I'd hang myself before morning!" The heartsick excitement of a man on the crest of some moral crisis looked out luridly from his eyes. Sylvia rose desperately to meet that crisis. "Look here, Arnold. I'm going to tell you something I've never spoken of to anybody ... not even Mother ... and I'm going to do it, so you'll _believe_ me when I say you're worth living. When I was eighteen years old I was a horrid, selfish, self-willed child. I suppose everybody's so at eighteen. I was just crazy for money and fine dresses and things like that, that we'd never had at home; and a man with a lot of money fell in love with me. It was my fault. I made him, though I didn't know then what I was doing, or at least I wouldn't let myself think what I was doing. And I got engaged to him. I got engaged at half-past four in the afternoon, and at seven o'clock that evening I was running away from him, and I've never seen him since." Her voice went on steadily, but a quick hot wave of scarlet flamed up over her face. "He was not a decent man," she said briefly, and went on: "It frightened me almost to death before I got my bearings: I was just a little girl and I hadn't understood anything--and I don't _understand_ much now. But I did learn one thing from all that--I learned to know when a man isn't decent. I can't tell you how I know--it's all over him--it's all over me--it's his eyes, the way he stands, the expression of his mouth--I don't only see it--I feel it--I feel it the way a thermometer feels it when you put a match under the bulb ... I _know_!" She brought her extravagant, her preposterous, her ignorant, her incredibly convincing claims to an abrupt end. "And you 'feel' that I ..." began Arnold, and could not go on. "I'd like you for my brother," she said gently.