She sank into a chair, but he remained standing, and seemed not to heed her when she asked him to sit down. He put Berry's letter into his pocket without looking at it, and she rose again. She must have thought he was going, and she said with a smile of gentle trust, “It's been like having last winter back again to see you. We thought you must have gone home right after the fire; we didn't see anything of you again. We went ourselves in about a week.” Then she did not know, and he must tell her himself. “Did Mr. Berry say anything about me--at the fire--that last day?” he began bluntly. “No!” she said, looking at him with surprise; there was a new sound in his voice. “He had no need to say anything! I wanted to tell you--to write and tell you--how much I honoured you for it--how ashamed I was for misunderstanding you just before, when--” He knew that she meant when they all pitied him for a coward. Her voice trembled; he could tell that the tears were in her eyes. He tried to put the sweetness of her praise from him. “Oh, it wasn't that that I meant,” he groaned; and he wrenched the words out. “That fellow, who said he was a friend of mine, and got into the house that way, was a thief; and Mr. Berry caught him robbing his room the day of the fire, and treated me as if I knew it and was helping him on--” “Oh!” cried the girl. “How cruel! How could he do that?” Lemuel could not suffer himself to take refuge in her generous faith now. “When I first came to Boston, I had my money stolen, and there were two days when I had nothing to eat; and then I was arrested by mistake for stealing a girl's satchel; and when I was acquitted, I slept the next night in the tramp's lodging-house, and that fellow was there, and when he came to the St. Albans I was ashamed to tell where I had known him, and so I let him pass himself off for my friend.” He kept his eyes fixed on hers, but he could not see them change from their pity of him, or light up with a sense of any squalor in his history. “And I used to think that _my_ life had been hard!” she cried. “Oh, how much you have been through!” “And after that,” he pursued, “Mr. Sewell got me a place, a sort of servant's place, and when I lost that I came to be the man-of-all work at the St. Albans.” In her eyes the pity was changing to admiration; his confession which he had meant to be so abject had kindled her fancy like a boastful tale. “How little we know about people and what they have suffered! But I thank you for telling me this--oh yes!--and I shall always think of myself with contempt. How easy and pleasant my life has been! And you--”