fered him."

"Yet you say he is capable of generosity!"

"Capable of generosity _at times_, Peter. And so he is. Most of us
have our generosities and our meannesses. Ted's like the rest of us in
both respects. The real trouble is that he's the wrong man for Sheila.
If she had married you, the same accident might have happened, but the
atonement wouldn't. For _you_ would have _wanted_ her to write; you
would have made her feel it wrong _not_ to write. It's not that you're
a better man than Ted, either; it's that you're a better man for
Sheila. You ought to have married her, my dear. I meant you to marry
her!"

Peter rose hastily from his chair and walked to the window, standing
there with his back to Mrs. Caldwell. Very rigidly he stood, his hands
at his side, tightly closed. When he finally turned again into the
room, his face was white.

"Why do you tell me that now--now that it's too late?" he asked. And
his voice shook with the question.

At something in that white face of his, at something in his unsteady
voice, Mrs. Caldwell grew very gentle: "Because I'm a blundering old
woman, Peter dear. But, since I have blundered, let us talk frankly.
I did intend you to marry Sheila. I plotted and planned for it from
the time she was a little girl in your rhetoric class. I believed that
in a marriage with you lay her chance to be both a happy and a
wonderful woman. And then--Ted married her instead! But there's still
something you can do for her. You can watch over her when I'm gone,
Peter. You can put out a saving hand now and then, if you see she
needs it. When I'm dead--and that will be soon, my dear--you'll be the
only person in the world who understands her. If I can feel that
you'll always be there ready to help her, I can die in peace. Bottled
up genius is a dangerous thing. Sometimes I am afraid for Sheila! But
if you'll promise to watch over her for me, I can die with my heart at
rest."

"There is nothing I would not do for you or for her!" he said.

"I know that, Peter. What wonder that I had my dreams about you?"

"They were dreams, just dreams," he responded, and now he was speaking
more easily. "I wasn't the right man for Sheila after all. If I had
been, she would have realized it; she wouldn't have married some one
else."

"How could she realize it--at twenty? And she was barely twenty when
she married. Peter, there's a moment in a girl's life when,
consciously or not, her