"It was," he said, and his own voice was low and broken too, and his deep and sad eyes wore a look she had never seen before,--the look that, in the eyes of a woman, would have spoken of welling tears,--"it was--yourself." "Myself!" she cried. "Oh, if it was myself, and there were goodness and truth, and what was worth remembering in me, why did it not save me from what I have been--and from what I am to-day? I do not think I meant to live my life so badly then; I was only careless and happy in a girlish way. I had so much faith and hope, and believed so much in all good things; and yet my life has all been wrong, and I seem to believe no more, and everything is lost to me; and since the days when I looked forward there is a gulf that I can never, never pass again." She came nearer to him, and a sob broke from her. "What am I to say to you," she said, "now that I know all that you have done for me while I--while I--Why should you have cared to protect me? I was not kind to you--I was not careful of your feelings"-- "No," he answered. "You--were not." "I used to think that you despised me," she went on, "once I told you so. I even tried to give you the reason. I showed my worst self to you; I was unjust and bitter; I hurt you many a time." He seemed to labor for his words, and yet he labored rather to control and check than to utter them. "I am going away," he said. "When I made the arrangement with Richard, of which you know, I meant to go away. I gathered, from what your father said, that you mean to render useless my poor effort to be of use to you." "I cannot "--she began, but she could go no farther. "When I leave you--as I must," he said, "let me at least carry away with me the memory that you were generous to me at the last." "At the last," she repeated after him, "the last!" She uttered a strange, little inarticulate cry. He saw her lift up one of her arms, look blindly at the bracelet on her wrist, drop it at her side, and then stand looking up at him. There was a moment of dead silence. "Janey shall take the money," she said; "I cannot." What the change was that he saw come over her white face and swaying figure he only felt, as he might have felt a blow in the dark from an unknown hand. What the great shock was that came upon him he only felt in the same way. She sank upon the sofa, clinging to the cushion with one shaking hand. Suddenly she broke into helpless sobbing, like a child's, tears streaming down her cheeks as she lifted her face in appeal.