h and through with keenest
agonies of remorseful recollection. For at the moment I had clean forgot
the gulf impassable I had set between these two. So I would have lapsed
into shamed silence, but Jennifer would not suffer it.

"Well, what is it that you think?" he demanded.

"I think--nay, I may say I know that she thinks well of you, Dick," I
blundered on, seeing no way to put him off.

He gripped my hand, and in his eyes there was the light of the old love
reawakening.

"Don't lift me up to fling me down again, Jack! How can you know what
she thinks of me?" he broke in, eagerly.

I should have told him then all there was to tell. He had been thrice my
savior, and his heart was soft and malleable on the side of friendship.
I knew it--knew that the pregnant moment for full confession had
arrived; and yet I could not force my tongue to shape the words. Indeed,
I saw more clearly than before that never any word of mine could make
him understand that I was not a faithless traitor in intention. So I
paltered with the truth, like any wretched coward of them all.

"You forget that I have come to know her well," I said. "I was a month
or more under the same roof with her, and in that time she told me many
things."

Now, this witless speech was no better than a whip to flog him on.

"What things?" he questioned, promptly.

"Oh, many things. She spoke often of you."

"What did she say of me, Jack? Tell me what she said," he begged. "It
can make no difference now; she is less than nothing to me--nay,'tis
even worse than that, since she would play Delilah if she could. But oh,
Jack, I love her!--I should love her if I stood on the gallows and she
stood by to spring the drop and turn me off!"

Truly, if the lash of remorse had lacked its keenest thong, this
passionate outburst of his would have added it. None the less, I must
needs be weaker than water and fall back another step and put him off.

"Another time, Richard. I am strangely unnerved and dizzy-headed now. By
and by, when I am stronger, I will tell you all."

Taking a reproach where none was meant, he sprang up with a self-aimed
malison upon his lack of care for me, stirred the fire alive and brewed
me a most delicious-smelling cup of broth. And afterward, when I had
drunk the broth with some small beckonings of returning appetite, he
spread his coat to screen me from the fire light and would have driven
me to sleep again.

"At any rate, you shall not tal