e who broke away.

He rose, and began to move about the room, as a man disturbed in his
mind usually does. She sat calm and expectant, watching him, a faint
smile on her lips, a kindness and a gentleness in her face that made it
inexpressibly sweet.

"I think, Johnny, you have something to say to me."

"Something that I hate saying. Joan, last night a man--a man I have
never seen before--came to see me."

She stiffened. The faint smile was gone; her face had become as a mask,
hard and cold, icy.

"Yes?"

"A man who had something to tell me--you will do me the justice to
believe that I did not wish to hear him, that I tried to silence him,
but he would not be silenced. He told me lies! foul lies about you!
lies!" Johnny said passionately, "things which I, knowing you, know to
be untrue. Yet he told them. I drove him out of the place. Then he came
back. He had remembered what his errand was--blackmail. He came to me
for money. But--but he did not stay, and then--" Johnny paused. He had
reached the window, and stood staring out into the garden, yet seeing
nothing of its beauty.

"You know," he went on, "that I do not ask you nor expect you to
deny--there is no need. What he said I know to be untrue. The man was a
villain, one of the lowest, but he has been paid."

"Paid?" she said. She stared.

"Not in money," Johnny said shortly, "in another way."

"You--you struck him?"

"No. I would have; but he saw the danger and fled from it--fled from the
punishment that I would have meted out to him to a harder that Fate had
in store for him."

"I don't understand."

"Just outside my gate he was knocked down by a car and very badly
injured; it is hardly probable that he will live. The people who knocked
him down came hammering on my door. We got him to the Cottage Hospital.
In spite of everything I felt sorry for the poor wretch--but that has
nothing to do with it now. I came to tell you what happened."

"And yet do not ask me to explain?"

"Of course not!" He swung round and faced her for a moment. "Do you
think I would put that indignity on you, Joan?"

"You are very generous, Johnny--why?"

She waited, listening expectantly for his answer. It was some time in
coming.

"I am not generous. I simply know that for you to be other than
honourable and innocent, pure and good, would be an impossibility."

"Why do you know that?"

"Because I know you."

She smiled. The answer she had almost dreaded to hear ha