the world more
than I love my life; and but for you I should have lost all."

He made a protesting motion. "The debt is mine, in truth. But for you I
should never have known what, perhaps--" He paused.

His eyes were on hers, gravely speaking what his tongue faltered to say.
She looked and looked, but did not understand. She only saw troubled
depths, lighted by a soul of kindling purpose. "Tell me," she said,
awed.

"Through you I have come to know--" He paused again. What he was going
to say, truthful though it was, must hurt her, and she had been sorely
hurt already. He put his thoughts more gently, more vaguely.

"By what happened I have come to see what matters in life. I was behind
the hedge. I have broken through upon the road. I know my goal now. The
highway is before me."

She felt the tragedy in his words, and her voice shook as she spoke. "I
wish I knew life better. Then I could make a better answer. You are on
the road, you say. But I feel that it is a hard and cruel road--oh, I
understand that at least! Tell me, please, tell me the whole truth. You
are hiding from me what you feel. I have upset your life, have I not?
You are a Quaker, and Quakers are better than all other Christian
people, are they not? Their faith is peace, and for me, you--" She
covered her face with her hands for an instant, but turned quickly and
looked him in the eyes: "For me you put your hand upon the clock of a
man's life, and stopped it."

She got to her feet with a passionate gesture, but he put a hand gently
upon her arm, and she sank back again. "Oh, it was not you; it was I who
did it!" she said. "You did what any man of honour would have done, what
a brother would have done."

"What I did is a matter for myself only," he responded quickly. "Had
I never seen your face again it would have been the same. You were the
occasion; the thing I did had only one source, my own heart and mind.
There might have been another way; but for that way, or for the way I
did take, you could not be responsible."

"How generous you are!" Her eyes swam with tears; she leaned over the
table where he had been writing, and the tears dropped upon his letter.
Presently she realised this, and drew back, then made as though to dry
the tears from the paper with her handkerchief. As she did so the words
that he had written met her eye: "'But offences must come, and woe to
him from whom the offence cometh!' I have begun now, and only now, to
feel the