time she grew quieter. He would perhaps still be lying on the
couch in the dull-colored library, under the one-eyed portrait, his hair
waving crisply against the white blanket, his hands moving restlessly,
his lips muttering. Her imagination followed Aunt Daph shuffling to
fetch this and that, nagged by the doctor's sharp admonitions.

He would get well! The thought that perhaps she had saved his life gave
her a thrill that ran over her whole body. And until yesterday she had
never seen him! She kneeled in the blurred half-light, pushing her wet
hair back from her forehead and smiling up in the rain that still fell
fast.

In a few moments she rose and went on. The lightning came now at longer
and more irregular intervals and the thunder pealed less heavily. The
wan yellow murk was lifting. Here and there a soaked sun-beam peered
half-frightened through the racked mist-wreaths, as though to smell the
over-sweet fragrance of the wet jessamine in her arms.

At the gate of the Rosewood lane stood a mailbox on a cedar post and she
paused to fish out a draggled Richmond newspaper. As she thrust it
under her arm her eye caught a word of a head-line. With a flush she
tore it from its soggy wrapper, the wetted fiber parting in her eager
fingers, and resting her foot on the lower rail of the gate, spread it
open on her knee.

She stood stock-still until she had read the whole. It was the story of
John Valiant's sacrifice of his private fortune to save the ruin of the
involved Corporation.

Its effect upon her was a shock. She felt her throat swell as she read;
then she was chilled by the memory of what she had said to him: "What
has he ever done except play polo and furnish spicy paragraphs for the
society columns?"

"What a beast I was!" she said, addressing the wet hedge. "He had just
done that splendid thing. It was because of that that he was little
better than a beggar, and I said those horrible things!" Again she bent
her eyes, rereading the sentences: "_Took his detractors by surprise ...
had just sustained a grilling at the hands of the State's examiner which
might well have dried at their fount the springs of sympathy._"

She crushed up the paper in her hand and rested her forehead on the wet
rail. Idiotically rich--a vandal--a useless purse-proud _flaneur_. She
had called him all that! She could still see the paleness of his look as
she had said it.

Shirley, overexcited as she still was, felt the sobs returnin