the nobility, but he knew that all true men, all he had ever met, must
have read him through and through. He had understood this before to a
certain point, had read himself to a certain mark of gauge, but he had
never been honestly and truly a man until this moment. His soul was
naked before his eyes. It had been naked before, but he had laughed.
Born without real remorse, he felt it at last. The true thing started
within him. God, the avenger, the revealer and the healer, had held up
this woman as a glass to him that he might see himself.

He saw her as she had been, a docile, soft-eyed girl, untouched by
anything that defames or shames, and all in a moment the man that had
never been in him until now, from the time he laughed first into his
mother's eyes as a babe, spoke out as simply as a child would have
spoken, and told the truth. There were no ameliorating phrases to soften
it to her ears; there was no tact, there was no blarney, there was no
suave suggestion now, no cheap gaiety, no cynicism of the social vampire
--only the direct statement of a self-reproachful, dying man.

"I didn't fully know what I was doing," he said to her. "If I had
understood then as I do now, I would never have come near you. It was
the worst wickedness I ever did."

The new note in his voice, the new fashion of his words, the new look of
his eyes, startled her, confused her. She could scarcely believe he was
the same man. The dumb desolation lifted a little, and a look of under
standing seemed to pierce her tragic apathy. As if a current of thought
had been suddenly sent through her, she drew herself up with a little
shiver, and looked at him as if she were about to speak; but instead of
doing so, a strange, unhappy smile passed across her lips.