e as yours."

The voice was scarce above a breath. "Sure, I didn't know at all. An'
you forgive me, Hinry darlin', you forgive me?"

"I've nothing to forgive," said Henry Withers.

A smile lighted the blanched face of the dying man. "Give me love to
the b'y--to Peter Macnamara," he said, and fell back with a smile on his
face.

"I'd do it again. Wot's a lie so long as it does good?" said Henry
Withers afterwards to Holgate the engineer. "But tell 'er--tell
Kitty--no fear! I ain't no bloomin' fool. 'E's 'appy--that's enough.
She'd cut me 'eart out, if she knowed I'd lied that lie."

THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS

I

Dimsdale's prospects had suddenly ceased by the productive marriage of a
rich uncle late in life; and then his career began. He went to Egypt
at the time when men who knew things had their chance to do things.
His information was general and discursive, but he had a real gift for
science: an inheritance from a grandfather who received a peerage for
abstruse political letters written to the Times and lectures before the
Royal Institution. Besides, he had known well and loved inadvertently
the Hon. Lucy Gray, who kept a kind of social kindergarten for confiding
man, whose wisdom was as accurate as her face was fair, her manners
simple, and her tongue demure and biting.

Egypt offered an opportunity for a man like Dimsdale, and he always said
that his going there was the one inspiration of his life. He did not
know that this inspiration came from Lucy Gray. She had purposely thrown
him in the way of General Duncan Pasha, who, making a reputation in
Egypt, had been rewarded by a good command in England and a K.C.B.

After a talk with the General, who had spent his Egyptian days in the
agreeable strife with native premiers and hesitating Khedives, Dimsdale
rose elated, with his mission in his hand. After the knock-down blow his
uncle had given him, he was in a fighting mood. General Duncan's tale
had come at the psychological moment, and hot with inspiration he had
gone straight off to Lucy Gray with his steamship ticket in his pocket,
and told her he was going to spend his life in the service of the pasha
and the fellah. When she asked him a little bitingly what form his
disciplined energy would take, he promptly answered: "Irrigation."

She laughed in his face softly. "What do you know about irrigation?" she
asked.

"I can learn it--it's the game to play out there, I'm sure of that," he
answered.