" The word rang with such unexpected finality that all my
hope went tumbling at the sound.

"Oh, he loves her, he loves her!" I thought and my pleading became the
pleading of despair. "Yes, yes, you will go back, if not for my sake
then for your own, and tell them what you have told me, and the rest of
it; and I know everything will come out right."

He still kept gazing at me with that puzzling expression, only now
there seemed to be more of tenderness than of incredulity in it. "You
seem to have great faith in things coming out right."

"Oh, but it's true," I urged. "They will, if only you will go back and
face the thing."

Slowly he shook his head. "Yes, it may be true. It may even be
workable in some cases, but I have got too far away from what is right
ever to get back. If I should try I would only succeed in doing some
one else still greater wrong--a wrong that even you, with all your
awful sense of justice, could not ask me to do."

He turned from me, and sat for a little while gazing straight before
him, and I looked at his stern profile set against the window glass,
saw the shift of expression upon it, and knew that he was thinking. At
last, turning to me again, as if there had been no interval between his
words, "But this much I can do," he said. "Even if I can not quite get
back to the great wrong, I will go back as far as I can in honor to set
this thing right. I will give myself up--" He waited a moment, then
added: "On one condition; that you will promise never to say a word of
what I have told you to-night."

"But," I protested, "then how will they ever know you are innocent?"

"They won't."

"Oh, but then you will be--" I began, with a wail.

"Wait, don't speak, don't answer until I have asked you another
question," and the strong touch of his hand held me quiet. "Suppose I
can't make it come out right--don't you think it is better to make a
strike to get as near to the right as I can, instead of going on,
getting deeper and deeper into the wrong?"

"Yes," I whispered. "Don't you?"

"I don't know," he said slowly. "I only know that since I have seen
you I can't go on. After being with you only for this little while,
after what you have told me, I can't go to her."

We faced each other in silence. My hands were clasped tightly in my
lap but my heart went out to him in gratitude and thankfulness.

Then, bending a little toward me, "Now, have I your word?" he gently
asked.