ook bad, and people
despise her. Now they will despise me."

"Never! they have only to look at you and hear you speak, to see what
you are."

"Honor said it was not enough to be good but to avoid doing the things
that make people think we are not. Now they are thinking perhaps that I
flirt with you and let you kiss me!" Her face was suffused with crimson
shame. Nothing was so horrible to contemplate as the fact that he had
kissed her! She was stripped of self-respect forever.

Dalton might have been tempted to smile at her self-accusing attitude
had it not been for her perfect sincerity. He felt overcome with
contrition and longed to atone.

"You make me infinitely ashamed," he said humbly. "Perhaps if you knew
what went towards making me such a brute-beast, you would feel just a
little sorry for me and understand--even bring yourself to like me a
little bit as you say you once did. I have never had a sister. It might
have made a difference if I had." After a pause--"Some years ago there
were two persons in whom I believed as--I believe--in God. One was a
woman and the other, my dearest pal. He and I were like brothers. I
would have trusted him with my life. I did more. I trusted him with my
honour." A pause. "And he whom I trusted and loved, robbed me of all
that made life dear to me, and of what I valued more than life. And the
woman I loved and believed pure and true, conspired with him to betray
my honour! I was their dupe. A blind confiding fool!"

"Oh!" was wrung sympathetically from Joyce.

"When I found out all I went mad, I think. I have been pretty mad--and
bad--ever since; but at the time, if I could have laid hands on both I
might have ended my career on the gallows. But Fate intervened. He was
killed in a railway accident shortly afterwards, and a year later, she
came whining to me for forgiveness."

"Did you forgive her?"

Dalton's eyes glowed with cruelty and an undying contempt. "Forgive her?
Not if she had been dying! There are things impossible to forgive. She
had killed my soul, destroyed my faith in human nature--which others,
since, have not helped to restore!--turned me into a very devil, and
without an incentive to live. Do you think I could forgive her? If I
hated her then, I loathe the very memory of her now."

"Yet you tried your best to make me one of the same sort?" Joyce asked
wonderingly.

"I did not believe, till you proved it to me, that women are of any
other sort," he repli