adeleine answered bitterly.

"You have one friend. You have me."

Then at last a sense of the strangeness of this scene rushed in a wave
over the consciousness of the lonely dweller in the castle.

"I don't understand," she said slowly. "Yesterday we had never met. I
only knew your name because you spoke of buying this poor, sad home of
mine. I----"

"Neither do I understand," broke in Virginia. "But I have never
understood myself. I only know that this seems to be the thing I was born
for. And if I fail in what I want to do for you and yours, why, I shall
have come into the world for nothing, that is all."

"But you are wonderful!" exclaimed Madeleine Dalahaide, realizing with
sudden force the other's extreme beauty and strong magnetism. "Did
you--is it possible that you ever knew my brother?"

"I never heard his name till yesterday. But I have seen you, I have seen
this house, I have heard something of the story, and--I have seen his
portrait. Nobody told me, of course, that it was his; nobody could. But I
knew at once. And I wondered how any one who had ever known him could
have believed that--that----"

"Don't be afraid to say it. Believed that he was a murderer. Oh,
friends--_friends_! Friendship is a flower that withers with the first
frost."

"You shan't have cause to think that of me--if you are going to take me
for a friend."

"I shall thank heaven for you. Even if you can do nothing, to think that
there is one human being in the world besides my poor aunt and me who
believe in him, is like balm on an open wound. Come with me into the room
where you saw the portrait. I painted it the year before--the end. I talk
to it sometimes, and for a moment I almost forget the horrible
truth--when the eyes smile back at me just as they used to do when we had
some joke together."

"As they will again," finished Virginia.

They went into the room of the portrait and stood before it in silence.
Each one felt that its look was for her.

"And yet," Madeleine said, as if answering a question, "there must be
some one who thinks of us, and remembers us with kindness, giving _him_
at least the benefit of a doubt; some one who talked to you of Max and
told you the story of--of his so-called crime in such a way as not to
fill your mind with horror."

"No one has told me the story yet," hesitated Virginia. "I have only
heard hints. They said--the word--_murder_! But that is not the face of
a murderer. How could any on