I saw it all clearly enough at last. The time was coming when this poor tangled love story would be set right; when the boy would come naturally and by instinct to the girl, and would take her in his arms, with a very perfect understanding of her purity and her innocence; so much had been ordained from the first. If they gave a thought to me, it would only be as the poor unknown grey-headed man that had been called Tinman, and had flitted into their lives for a brief hour, and flitted out again, and so been done with. Even the woman who stood beside me--that elder Barbara--was only mercifully permitted to look on at the completion of the love story she and I might have lived ourselves. After all, God had been very good to me. "I don't understand," Barbara was saying to me, as we stood beside the sleeping girl. "What way will you take?--what will you do?" "You will know presently," I whispered, lest I should wake the sleeper. "In any case, I want you to promise one thing: I want you to take the girl back to her father, and to leave her safely in his hands. Promise me--swear to me that nothing shall turn you from that purpose; nothing that you hear--nothing that you suspect. All that I hope to do, and all that I shall strive to do, will be brought to naught if you fail me in that." "I promise, my dear," she said solemnly. "But Olivant?" "Will trouble her no more," I replied. "I wonder if you remember what I said to you once--twenty long years ago?" "I hope I remember," she whispered. "Say the words again." "I lay under sentence of death; I was to die the next morning. You came to me; you had travelled hard and fast to reach me before they killed me. Do you remember?" She bowed her head, and whispered that she did. I went on--repeating the words I had used so long before; they had been in my mind many many times since, and I had not forgotten them. "This is what I said to you. 'In the years that are coming it may happen, in God's own good time, that some child you love may stand in need of a friend who will strike as I struck--fight as I fought--for her honour. It may happen, long after I am dead and forgotten by all but you, that some such an one may spring up, to do again more perfectly what I did--springing from the dead ashes of my past to work out the pitiful story I began.' Do you remember?" "Perfectly," she whispered; and now she looked at me with startled eyes. "I never thought then," I went on, "that it would fall to me to do again what I did then; I was as one dead when I spoke those words. But all things have fitted in so wonderfully and so strangely; there is no drawing back for me, and there is no one else who can strike the blow--no one with a greater right." She drew me away out of the room, and closed the door; we stood together on the landing outside, looking into each other's eyes--I very calm and resolute, and she trembling and afraid.