"This is between you and me, Craig," she pleaded, struggling for self-control. "I am the honest woman you have always believed me. I have concealed nothing shameful. My only thought was to spare you pain. You shall know now, everything; but it is a story for your ears alone. It concerns us only, dear, our happiness, our love." He cast a look of entreaty at Julie, who met it with an acid smile. "You are wax in her hands," she taunted. "She can cajole you into thinking black is white." "No, no," he protested. "You are unjust to her, Julie. I know her as you cannot. She is the soul of truth." Jean's heart leaped at his words. "God bless you for that!" she exclaimed. "Let her hear, then! Why should I fear her now?" The dentist's attentions at the boarding-house, their walks and theater-goings, his help when the department store cast her out, their engagement, the taking and furnishing of a flat, the apparition of Stella, the confession and the crash--all she touched upon without false shame, without attempt to gloss her free agency and responsibility. She dealt gently with Paul, magnifying his virtues, palliating his great fault, bearing witness to the sincerity of his remorse. But Craig she could not spare, pity him as she might. She saw his drawn face wince as if under bodily pain, and before she ended he was groping for a chair. She perceived, as she had feared, that an ideal was gone from him, perhaps the dearest ideal of all; yet she did not realize what a blow she had struck this stunned, flaccid figure with averted head, till, breaking the long silence which oppressed the room when she had done, he asked,-- "Did you love this man, Jean?" She weighed her answer painfully. "Not as we know love, Craig," she said. "You would have sold yourself for a home--for a flat in the Lorna Doone! Where was your remembrance of the birches then?" She forgave the words in pity for the pain which begot them. She forgot Julie. Nothing in life mattered, if love were lost. A great devouring fear lest he slip from her drove her forward and flung her kneeling at his side.