ou not finish your work? Will you not trust me? It is no hot passion
that can pass away, my love for you. It springs from all that is best in
me--from the part of me that is wholesome and joyous and strong, the part
of me that belongs to you."

Releasing her, he turned away.

"The other part of me--the blackguard--it is dead, dear,--dead and
buried. I did not know I was a blackguard, I thought myself a fine
fellow, till one day it came home to me. Suddenly I saw myself as I
really was. And the sight of the thing frightened me and I ran away from
it. I said to myself I would begin life afresh, in a new country, free
of every tie that could bind me to the past. It would mean
poverty--privation, maybe, in the beginning. What of that? The struggle
would brace me. It would be good sport. Ah, well, you can guess the
result: the awakening to the cold facts, the reaction of feeling. In
what way was I worse than other men? Who was I, to play the prig in a
world where others were laughing and dining? I had tramped your city
till my boots were worn into holes. I had but to abandon my quixotic
ideals--return to where shame lay waiting for me, to be welcomed with the
fatted calf. It would have ended so had I not chanced to pass by your
door that afternoon and hear you strumming on the piano."

So Billy was right, after all, thought Tommy to herself, the piano does
help.

"It was so incongruous--a piano in Crane Court--I looked to see where the
noise came from. I read the name of the paper on the doorpost. 'It will
be my last chance,' I said to myself. 'This shall decide it.'"

He came back to her. She had not moved. "I am not afraid to tell you
all this. You are so big-hearted, so human; you will understand, you can
forgive. It is all past. Loving you tells a man that he has done with
evil. Will you not trust me?"

She put her hands in his. "I am trusting you," she said, "with all my
life. Don't make a muddle of it, dear, if you can help it."

It was an odd wooing, as Tommy laughingly told herself when she came to
think it over in her room that night. But that is how it shaped itself.

What troubled her most was that he had not been quite frank with Peter,
so that Peter had to defend her against herself.

"I attacked you so suddenly," explained Peter, "you had not time to
think. You acted from instinct. A woman seeks to hide her love even
from herself."

"I expect, after all, I am more of a