"How can that be?" He put his back to the window so that he had not to look in her eyes. "Grace for most men takes the form of an ideal. So long as the condition to be attained is ahead there is hope, but when one has turned his back upon it"-- Indirection fences badly with open-eyed sincerity, and he did not finish. But the door was open now, and Constance meant to do her whole duty. "I think I understand," she assented; "but I wish you would be quite frank with me. In a way, I am Mr. Bartrow's deputy, and if I have to tell him you refuse to let him help you, I shall have to give him a better reason than you have given me." "You are inexorable," he said, and there was love in his eyes, despite his efforts reasonward. "I wish I dared tell you the whole miserable truth." "And why may you not?" "Because it concerns--a woman." She shrank back a little at that, and he saw that she had misunderstood. Wherefore he plunged recklessly into the pool of frankness. "The woman is a good woman," he went on quickly, "and one day not so very long ago I loved her well enough to believe that I could win my way back to decency and uprightness for her sake. It was a mistake. I had fallen lower than I knew, and the devil came in for his own." Here was something tangible to lay hold of at last, and Connie made instant use of it. "Does she know?" she asked. The mirthless smile came and went again. "She thinks she does." "But you haven't told her all; is that it?" "I have tried to, but, being a good woman, she can't understand. I think I didn't fully understand, myself; but I do now." "Is it so far beyond reparation?" "It is indeed. If the devil's emissary who has brought me to this pass could be exorcised this moment I should never recover the lost ground of self-respect. There is nothing to go back to. If I had not to be despicable from necessity, I should doubtless be so from choice." "I think you are harder with yourself than you would be with another. Can't you begin to believe in yourself again? _I_ believe in you." "You!--but you don't know what you are saying, Miss Elliott. See!"--his coat was buttoned to the chin, tramp-wise, and he tore it open to show her the rags that underlay it--"do you understand now? I have pawned the shirt off my back--not to satisfy the cravings of hunger, but to feed a baser passion than that of the most avaricious miser that ever lived. Do I make it plain that I am not worthy of your sympathy, or of Richard Bartrow's?" For once the clear gray eyes were veiled, and her chin quivered a little when she spoke. "You hurt me more than I can tell," she said.