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218 on my account, Miss Shannon … I quite understand there must be things I can't understand—that you must have had your reasons for acting as you did."

"Yes," she said unevenly, but again with eyes averted—"I had; but they're not easy, they're impossible to explain—to you."

"Yet—when all's said and done—I've no right to exact any explanation."

"Ah, but how can you say that, remembering what we've been through together?"

"You owe me nothing," he insisted; "whereas I owe you everything, even unquestioning faith. Even though I fail, I have this to thank you for—this one not-ignoble impulse my life has known."

"You mustn't say that, you mustn't think it. I don't deserve it. You wouldn't say it—if you knew—"

"Perhaps I can guess enough to satisfy myself."

She gave him a swift, sidelong look of challenge, instinctively on the defensive.

"Why," she almost gasped—"what do you think—?"

"Does it matter what I think?"

"It does, to me: I wish to know!"

"Well," he conceded reluctantly, "I think that, when you had a chance to consider things calmly, waiting back there in the garden, you made up your mind it would be better to—to use your best judgment and—extricate yourself from an embarrassing position—"

"You think that!" she interrupted bitterly. "You think that, after you had confided in me; after you'd confessed—when I made you, led you on to it—that you