“Because—because it isn’t—it isn’t possible! You”—she seemed to be shivering—“you could never have—” “But I did.” She gasped brokenly. “You? You?” I nodded. “Yes—I.” I tried to tell her, but I suppose I did it badly. Put into a few bald words the tale was not merely sordid, it was low. I could give it no softening touch, no saving grace. It was more beastly than I had ever imagined it. Fortunately she didn’t listen with attention. The means were indifferent to her when she knew the end. For the minute, at any rate, she saw me not as I stood there, clean and in white, but as I had been a year before, dirty and in rags. But she saw more than that. With every word I uttered she saw the ideal she had formed broken into shivers, like a shattered looking-glass. She interrupted my preposterous story to gasp, “I can’t believe it!” “But it’s true.” “Then you mustn’t mind if—if I put you to a test. Did you—did you write anything while you were there?” “I printed something—in the same kind of letters you’ve seen at the bottom of architects’ plans.” “And how did you come to do it?” I recounted the circumstance, at which she nodded her head in verification. “So that was how you knew the words you repeated to me a few months ago?” “That was how. I said there were men in the world different from any you’d seen yet; and I told you to wait.” She made a tremendous effort to become again the daring mistress of herself which she generally was. She smiled, too, nervously, and with a kind of sickening, ghastly whiteness. “Funny, isn’t it? There are men in the world different from any I’d seen before that time. I’ve—I’ve waited—and found out.” Before I could utter a rejoinder to this she said, quite courteously, “Will you excuse me?” I bowed. With no further explanation she marched down the length of the veranda—carrying herself proudly, placing her dainty feet daintily, walking with that care which people show when they are not certain of their ability to walk straight—and entered the house. I didn’t know why she had gone; but I knew the worst was over. Though I felt humiliation to the core of the heart’s core, I also felt relief. With a foot dangling, I sat sidewise on the veranda rail and waited. Glancing at my watch, I saw it was not yet four, and I had lived through years since I had climbed the hill at one. My sensations were comparable only to those of the man who has been on trial for his life and is waiting for the verdict. I waited nervously, and yet humbly. Now that it was all over, it seemed to me that the bitterness of death was past. Whatever else I should have to go through in life, nothing could equal the past quarter of an hour.