"You have been good to me," she said. "You have been kind. Be good to me--be kind to me--once more. You must go away--and I cannot take from you what you want to give me; but I am not so bad as I have seemed--or so hard! What you have wished me to be I will try to be! I will live for my children. I will be--as good--as I can. I will do anything you tell me to do--before you leave me! I will live all my life afterward--as Bertha Herrick might have lived it! Only do not ask me to take the money!" For a few seconds all the room was still. When he answered her she could barely hear his voice. "I will ask of you nothing," he said. He lifted her hand and bowed his head over it. Then he laid it back upon the cushion. It lay there as if it had been carved from stone. "Good-by," he said. "Good-by." He saw her lips part, but no sound came from them. So he went away. He scarcely felt the floor beneath his feet. He saw nothing of the room about him. It seemed as if there was an endless journey between himself and the door through which he was to pass. The extremity of his mortal agony was like drunkenness. When he was gone, she fell with a shudder, and lay still with her cheek against the crimson cushion. The professor was sitting at her bedside when she opened her eyes again. Her first recognition was of his figure, sitting, the head bowed upon the hand, as she had seen it when she came first into the house. "Papa," she said, "you are with me?" "Yes, my dear," he answered. "And--there is no one else?" "No, my dear." She put out her hand and laid it upon his arm. He thought, with a bitter pang, that she did it as she had often done it in her girlhood, and that, in spite of the change in her, she wore a look which seemed to belong to those days too. "You will stay with me," she said. "I have come back to you." CHAPTER XL. Miss Jessup was very eloquent in the paragraph which she devoted to the announcement of the departure of Colonel Tredennis, "the well-known hero of the plains, whose fine, bronzed face and soldierly figure have become so familiar to us during the past three seasons." She could scarcely express the regret felt by the many friends he had made, on losing him, and, indeed, there ran throughout the flowers of speech a suggestion of kindly, admiring sympathy and womanly good-feeling which quite went to the colonel's heart, and made him wonder at his own good fortune when he read the paragraph in question. He was far away from Washington when the paper reached him. He had become tired of life at the Capital, it was said, and had been glad to exchange with a man who found its gayeties better suited to him. "It is true," he said to himself when he heard of this report, "that they were not suited to me, nor I to them."