"You--you've misunderstood. No ... no! I didn't mean that at all."

"Oh!... Do you mean--you don't wish to see Colonel
Dalhousie--personally? Of course not!... It wouldn't be necessary in the
least. Perhaps you would let me.... And as to a telegram to Dal--"

"_No_--_no!_... You mustn't go to see him. You mustn't send a telegram.
I can't allow that--you've misunderstood entirely. _You mustn't tell
anybody_...."

They stared at each other with the same colorless faces, and again the
rain became audible. In the man's too-confiding eyes, hope died hard.

"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