“Do you remember,” she went on, “what you said to me when last we met—when I told you you should have your answer definitely? Do you remember that; or have you forgotten it, like so many other things?” “I said so many things, that perhaps I may have forgotten which one you refer to.” Philip Chater felt rather proud of himself, after this speech. “You said—‘I’m going to be a stronger, better fellow than I have ever been before; you shall find me changed from to-night; you shall find I’ll be a new man.’ Do you remember that?” It was a trying moment; and, for the life of him, Philip Chater found it difficult to keep his voice quite steady, when he answered, after a pause—“Yes—I remember.” For this girl, with her hands locked on his arm, and with her eyes looking so trustfully and confidingly into his, had heard those words, of repentance, and hope, and well-meaning, however lightly said, from the lips of a man she would see no more, and who was now washing about horribly, a disfigured thing, with the life beaten out of it. And the man who stood beside her, in his place—in his very clothes—was a fraud and an impostor. “Did you mean it, Dandy dear? Was it true?” He answered from his heart, and spoke the truth, in that instance at least. “Yes—God knows it was true,” he said. They had left the road, and had turned through a gate into a little wood, which belonged, he supposed, to his own estates. Here, quite suddenly, she stopped, and held out both her hands to him. Very gravely—and, it must be said, with a growing anxiety which matched an expression in her own eyes—he took the hands in his, and looked, as steadily as he might, into her face. “Dandy—my dear boy—as friends—as man and woman—we have said some bitter things to each other—have parted in anger, more than once. You have been wild, I know—have made some blunders, as we all must make them, in our poor journey here on earth. But you have sworn to me that those old tales, about you—you and Patience Miller—forgive me; I promised never to mention the subject again; but I must—I _must_—you have told me that all that story was mere malicious gossip. As Heaven is my witness, I believed you then; but tell me once again. Tell me,” she pleaded—“that no woman need hide her face to-day, because of you; tell me that—reckless and foolish as you may have been—no living creature weeps to-day, because of you.”