“I was wrong—I was terribly wrong,” was the way in which she began her letter. “For as I told you in my cable, _I am coming back_. It is now all useless, and hopeless, and too late. And I thought, when I was once away from you, that it would be easy to learn to live without you. But during these last few weeks, when I have been so absolutely and so miserably alone, I have needed and cried for you—oh, Jim, how I have needed you! I have learned, too, how even an inflexible purpose, how even a relentless sense of duty, may become more sinister than the blindest selfishness. It was cruel and cowardly in me—for as you once said, we must now sink or swim together. I forgot that you, too, were alone, that you, too, needed help and companionship, even more than I. And I had thought that morality and its geography, that mere flight from my misdoings meant that they were ended, that here in some quiet spot I could be rid of all my past, that I could put on a new character like a new bonnet, that life was a straight and never-ending lane, and not a blind mole-run forever winding and crossing and turning on itself! I thought that I could creep away, and forget you, and what I had been, and what I had lived through, and what had been shown to me. But the world is not that easy with us. It defeats us where we least expect it; it turns against us when we most need it. I had always dreamed that my uncle’s high-walled home at Oxford could be nothing but a place of quiet and contentment. I had always thought of it as a cloister, into which I could some day retire, and find unbroken rest and a solemn sort of happiness. Then came the revelation, the blow that cut the very ground from under my feet. _They_ had their troubles and their sorrows, as well as I. Life could hang as dark for them as it hung for me. My cousin Albert, a mere boy, reading for the Bar in London, had a friend in the City named Singford. I will try to tell you everything as clearly and as briefly as possible. Young Singford is rather a black sheep, of an idle and wealthy family. He involved Albert in a stock-gambling scheme—oh, such a transparent and childish scheme, poor boy!—and Albert, in despair, went to his father. He had to have money to cover his losses; it would be paid back within the month. His father, the soul of uprightness, borrowed the money from what was, I think, the Diocesan Mission Fund, in the belief that it would be promptly repaid. Then came the crash. I found them broken and dazed under it, helpless, hopeless, bewildered. It was so new to them, so outside their every-day life and experience! I went straight to London, and hunted up my cousin, who was actually talking about shooting himself. I found that young Singford, who had been sent down from Balliol, had blindly plunged with Albert on some foolish Texas Oil enterprise. I needn’t tell you more, except that the whole sum was not quite two hundred pounds. But it meant Albert’s