d you I had my reasons. And since you are
here--and the mere sight of you assures me that you are as well as
Fanny charged me to find you--with all these preliminaries disposed
of, I am going to relieve you, in a small measure, of the weight of
your obligation."

Durham raised his head quickly. "By letting me do something in
return?"

She made an assenting motion. "By asking you to answer a question."

"That seems very little to do."

"Don't be so sure! It is never very little to your race." She leaned
back, studying him through half-dropped lids.

"Well, try me," he protested.

She did not immediately respond; and when she spoke, her first words
were explanatory rather than interrogative.

"I want to begin by saying that I believe I once did you an
injustice, to the extent of misunderstanding your motive for a
certain action."

Durham's uneasy flush confessed his recognition of her meaning. "Ah,
if we must go back to _that_--"

"You withdraw your assent to my request?"

"By no means; but nothing consolatory you can find to say on that
point can really make any difference."

"Will not the difference in my view of you perhaps make a difference
in your own?"

She looked at him earnestly, without a trace of irony in her eyes or
on her lips. "It is really I who have an _amende_ to make, as I now
understand the situation. I once turned to you for help in a painful
extremity, and I have only now learned to understand your reasons
for refusing to help me."

"Oh, my reasons--" groaned Durham.

"I have learned to understand them," she persisted, "by being so
much, lately, with Fanny."

"But I never told her!" he broke in.

"Exactly. That was what told _me_. I understood you through her, and
through your dealings with her. There she was--the woman you adored
and longed to save; and you would not lift a finger to make her
yours by means which would have seemed--I see it now--a desecration
of your feeling for each other." She paused, as if to find the exact
words for meanings she had never before had occasion to formulate.
"It came to me first--a light on your attitude--when I found you had
never breathed to her a word of our talk together. She had
confidently commissioned you to find a way for her, as the mediaeval
lady sent a prayer to her knight to deliver her from captivity, and
you came back, confessing you had failed, but never justifying
yourself by so much as a hint of the reason why. And when I had