be the first
to express her pleasure in any good fortune which might concern you.

"AILSA PAIGE."

Two days passed, and her answer came:

"Ailsa Paige, dearest and most respected, I have not forgotten you
for one moment. And I have tried very hard.

"God knows what my pen is trying to say to you, and not hurt you,
and yet kill utterly in you the last kindly and charitable memory
of the man who is writing to you.

"Ailsa, if I had known you even one single day before that night I
met you, you would have had of me, in that single day, all that a
man dare lay at the feet of the truest and best of women.

"But on that night I came to you a man utterly and hopelessly
ruined--morally dead of a blow dealt me an hour before I saw you
for the first time.

"I had not lived an orderly life, but at worst it was only a
heedless life. I had been a fool, but not a damned one. There was
in me something loftier than a desire for pleasure, something
worthier than material ambition. What else lay latent--if
anything--I may only surmise. It is all dead.

"The blow dealt me that evening--an hour before I first laid eyes
on you--utterly changed me; and if there was anything spiritual in
my character it died then. And left what you had a glimpse
of--just a man, pagan, material, unmoral, unsafe; unmoved by
anything except by what appeals to the material senses.

"Is that the kind of man you suppose me? That is the man I am.
And you _know_ it now. And you know, now, what it was in me that
left you perplexed, silent, troubled, not comprehending--why it was
you would not dance with me again, nor suffer my touch, nor endure
me too near you.

"It was the less noble in me--all that the blow had not
killed--only a lesser part of a finer and perfect passion that
might perhaps have moved you to noble response in time.

"Because I should have given you all at the first meeting; I could
no more have helped it than I could have silenced my heart and
lived. But what was left to give could awake in you no echo, no
response, no comprehension. In plainer, uglier words, I meant to
make you love me; and I was ready to carry you with me to that hell
where souls are lost through love--and where we might lose our
souls together.

"And now you will never write to me again."

All the afternoon she bent at her desk, poring over his letter. In
her frightened heart she knew that something within her, not
spiritual, had responded to w