"I don't just understand," he said slowly. "You mean that this money is the equivalent of what I should have made in the land deal?" "Yes." His face tinged faintly with red, his bright eyes (he had discarded glasses, now that a disguise no longer served him) darted quick flames, and he leaned toward her. "Do you think I can take as a gift that which I honestly earned?" he demanded in a low, fierce voice. "But it is not offered as a gift. It is restitution." "Restitution! So you want to make restitution? Can you restore the strength despair has taken from me? My good name was built on deception, but I had worked hard for it and it was dear to me. Can you restore my good name? I've lost everything! Can you restore everything?" The ringing bitterness of his voice, the wasted face working with the passion of despair, the utter hopelessness of the future which her quick vision showed her--all these stirred a great emotion which swept her father from her mind. Before, she had sympathised with Rogers abstractly; now her sympathy was for a hopeless soul, bare and agonising beneath her eyes. Her words rushed from her, in them the throb of her heart. "No! No! I can't give them back--no one can. Oh, what a wrong it was!" He stared at her. The wrath and bitterness on his face slowly gave place to surprise. "Oh, but it was a shame!" she cried, her face aflame, her voice aquiver. And then a sense of the irretrievableness of this wreck laid hold upon her and a quick sob broke forth. She felt a sympathetic agony for Rogers, and an agony that she, through her blood, was the cause of his wrecked life. "Oh, it was terrible, terrible! You are right! Restitution cannot be made--only the pitiful restitution of money. But you must let me make that--you must!" He felt that he was speaking to a friend, and it was as to a friend that he said quietly: "I can't." "But you _must_!" She was now thinking of but one thing, how to force him to take the bills. "I'm not doing you a favour. I'm asking a favour from you. I come to you in humility, contrition. The money I bring is not my money--it is your money. My father entered your house and took it; I bring it back to you. You merely accept your own. You see that, don't you? Surely you see that!" Rogers did not answer at once. He was so dazed by the rush of her words--words that sprang from complete sympathy and understanding, words that might have come from his own heart--that he could not. She had risen and now stood above him. "You understand, don't you?" she went on imploringly. "My father has done wrong; I feel it just as though I had done it. I must repair the wrong as far as I can. You must take this money for my sake, don't you see?"