filed; a beautiful, tender memory.

Perhaps--and at this Raymond shuddered--perhaps he had driven the girl
upon a reef. He had heard of such things. In despair she had violently
taken herself out of his reach. He could not believe she had been
seriously involved while she played with him. Whatever she was, he could
but believe that she was innocent in her regard for him--else why this
mad flight? And he could not believe that her regard for him was
serious. He was humble enough.

After leaving Joan the night before Raymond had met his Other Self
squarely in the shrouded house. Toward morning he had come to a
conclusion: he was prepared to pay to the uttermost for his folly,
whatever the demand might be. She must be the judge.

He would go to the tea room--not to the house that he had so brutally
invaded. He would again talk to the girl and watch her--he would make
her understand that he was not as weak as he might seem. If he had
misunderstood, that should not exempt him from responsibility. But if
she should spurn any attempt of his to remedy the evil he could regard
himself with a comparatively clean conscience.

Raymond could not get away from the idea that the girl was of his
world--the world where he was supposed, by Mrs. Tweksbury and her kind,
to constantly be.

But then the empty tea room--and how empty it was!--stared him blankly
in the face. Miss Gordon's manner angered him beyond expression. Almost
he felt he must tell her of his own low part in the tragedy in order to
place her beside the girl he had insulted, instead of beside him, as he
felt she was.

Raymond was hurt, disappointed, and disgusted; but as the day wore on a
grave and common-sense wave of relief flooded his consciousness. Bad as
things had been, they might, God knows, have been worse. As it was, with
the best of intentions, he was set aside by the girl's own conduct of
her affairs.

To seek her further would be the greatest of folly and then, toward
night, lonely, half ill, Raymond undertook that time-honoured custom of
turning over a new leaf only to find that it stuck to the old
persistently!

Then he resorted to a sensible alternative--he read and re-read the old
page. He tried to understand it line by line. He was humbled; filled
with shame at his meaningless attitude of the past, and acknowledged
that the grit in him, that he had hoped was sand, was, after all, the
dirt that could easily defile. He must begin anew and rebuild.