Page:Cornelia Meigs--The windy hill.djvu/203

Rh "I knew it wasn't true, but people love to deceive themselves, and I had to explain to Martha. She would never have come if she had known how things really stood; she was unwilling, even as it was. But I was so sure, I thought I knew Jasper so well, exactly how I could threaten him, just where I could hurt him most. Had I not learned, when I was a boy, how proud and sensitive and generous he could be? I was as successful as I had hoped to be, but I wanted more and more, and see where it has brought me in the end!"

It seemed a relief to him to confess the very whole of his wrong-doing, to leave hidden no single meanness or small-souled thought. It was as though, in the clean night air, in the face of two just and clear-seeing companions, he wished to cast aside all the wrong of the past before making a new beginning.

"I am going away," he said. "It isn't because I found that my plan didn't pay as I had hoped it would. It is because I was happier back there in the West, serving out a sentence at hard labor, learning to live by the work of my hands rather than by my dishonorable wits. I can look back over my life and see just where my honesty began to waver, just when I first compromised with my own conscience and persuaded myself that something was fair and honest when I knew it was not. We had all the same chance, Jasper and Tom and I; look at them and look at me. You may wonder why I say all this to you. Perhaps it is because you alone saw