"Not tell anybody? Why, I don't see ... There's no other way of making it right, I'm afraid.... And you have told me--" "But I didn't tell you to tell anybody else. I didn't. I only meant to tell _you_, don't you see?..." This subtlety was past the vision of the donator of the Dabney House. North, south, east, or west, he could see nothing but a seraph-faced girl whose misery it was to feel the penitential pangs, yet not be able quite to rise to the fulness of reparation. That she had reached for that fulness was to him the one thing certain in all the world. What want of delicacy in him had caused her to falter and look backward?... Into the lucid gray of his eyes had come that look which more than once before Carlisle Heth had found intolerable. Little she recked for it now. Was not this the heart of her present dilemma, that she had already followed his ocular incitements too fatally far? By what religious prestidigitation he had trapped her secret from her must remain a thick mystery now. Nothing mattered but that he, having deceitfully seemed to agree that it was all a matter between herself and him, should not now turn and betray her.... _Tell now?_ The sudden vista of scandal horrified her. How would she ever face mamma again? How would Hugo, whose bride and pride she was, regard her then?... "Don't you see?" she said, with gathering tensity--"I--I meant it as _a confidence to you_. You mustn't dream of telling anybody else...." "But neither you nor I own the truth. This belongs to Dalhousie...." "Oh, it doesn't!--it doesn't! How can you! You misunderstand!--What I said to you gave you a totally wrong impression. He was entirely to blame for my upsetting. _Entirely!_ He behaved abominably--and I--" "_Tell now!" _cried the man, with his strange stern passion. "Once it's done, you'll always be glad. Don't you know you _must_, now! Don't you see you can't be happy, till you let the truth be known?..." There came from above the unmistakable movement of chairs, the sound of many feet. It appeared that the Settlement meeting was breaking up. The man's entreaties bounded back dead. "I couldn't!--Don't you understand? There's nothing to tell. It was not my fault. The story was distorted, distorted, and distorted! I regretted that as much as any one. But I could do nothing, nothing to stop it. And don't you understand I couldn't possibly tell this broadcast _now_, when it's been done with for _months!_ What would people think of me? Don't you--" "What will you have to think of yourself if you don't tell?" But the hard shot missed fire, the reason being that what she thought of herself did not matter in the least just now. She was mamma's daughter, Hugo Canning's betrothed, fighting for her own: and now that movement upstairs warned her that she had no moment to lose. Carlisle seized the slum doctor's arm with a resolute little hand. Her voice, though panicky, was as inexorable as mamma's own.