So he said, and so he meant to do; but it proved to be a rather exciting day at the Mining Exchange, and he forgot the commission until he was about to board a homeward-bound car in the evening. Then he found that he was too late. The body of the suicide had been shipped East in accordance with telegraphic instructions received at noon. When he made his report to Constance, she fell back upon Tommie's assurance, and sent the delayed answer to Bartrow's message, telling him that his friend was dead.

Having sorrowfully recorded all these things in the book of facts accomplished, it was not wonderful that Constance, coming out of Margaret Gannon's room late the following afternoon, should cover her face and cry out in something akin to terror when she cannoned against Jeffard at the turn in the dingy hallway. Neither was it remarkable that her strength should forsake her for the moment; nor that Jeffard, seeing her plight, should forget his degradation and give her timely help by leading her to a seat in the dusty window embrasure. At that the conventionalities, or such shreds of them as might still have bound either of them, parted asunder in the midst, and for the time being they were but a man and a woman, as God had created them.

"Oh, I'm so glad!" were her first words. "I – I thought you were dead!"

"I ought to be," was his comment. "But what made you think that?"

"It was in the newspaper – about the man who shot himself. I was afraid it was you, and when Tommie had been to see we were sure of it."

"In the newspaper?" he queried; and then, with a ghost of a smile which was mirthless: "It was a little previous, but so justifiable that I really ought to take the hint. Can't you tell me more? I'm immensely interested."

She told him everything from the beginning, concluding with a pathetic little appeal for forgiveness if she had done wrong in taking too much for granted.

"You couldn't well do that," he hastened to say. "And you mustn't ask forgiveness for motives which an angel might envy. But it is casting pearls before swine in my case, Miss Elliott. I have sown the wind, deliberately and with malice aforethought, and now I am reaping the whirlwind, and regretting day by day that it doesn't develop sufficient violence to finish that which it has begun."

"Please don't say that," she pleaded. "There are always hands stretched out to help us, if we could but see and lay hold of them. Why won't you let Dick help you when he is so anxious to do it? You will, now that you know about it, won't you?"

"I knew about it before. Lansdale told me, but I made him promise to drop it. It isn't that I wouldn't accept help from Bartrow as willingly as I would from any one in the world; it is simply that I don't care to take the chance of adding ingratitude to my other ill-doings."

"Ingratitude?"

"Yes. The man who allows his friend to help him in any crisis of his own making should at least be able to give bond for his good behavior. I can't do that now. I wouldn't trust myself to go across the street. I know my own potentiality for evil too well."

"But potentiality isn't evil," she protested. "It's only the power to do things, good or bad. And if one have that there is always hope."

"Not for me," he said shortly. "I have sinned against grace."

"Who hasn't?" Constance rejoined. "But grace doesn't die because it's sinned against."

He smiled again at that. "I think my particular allotment of grace is dead beyond the hope of resurrection."

"How can that be?"

He put his back to the window so that he had not to look in her eyes.

"Grace for most men takes the form of an ideal. So long as the condition to be attained is ahead there is hope, but when one has turned his back upon it" —

Indirection fences badly with open-eyed sincerity, and he did not finish. But the door was open now, and Constance meant to do her whole duty.

"I think I understand," she assented; "but I wish you would be quite frank with me. In a way, I am Mr. Bartrow's deputy, and if I have to tell him you refuse to let him help you, I shall have to give him a better reason than you have given me."

"You are inexorable," he said, and there was love in his eyes, despite his efforts reasonward. "I wish I dared tell you the whole miserable truth."

"And why may you not?"

"Because it concerns – a woman."

She shrank back a little at that, and he saw that she had misunderstood. Wherefore he plunged recklessly into the pool of frankness.

"The woman is a good woman," he went on quickly, "and one day not so very long ago I loved her well enough to believe that I could win my way back to decency and uprightness for her sake. It was a mistake. I had fallen lower than I knew, and the devil came in for his own."

Here was something tangible to lay hold of at last, and Connie made instant use of it.

"Does she know?" she asked.

The mirthless smile came and went again. "She thinks she does."

"But you haven't told her all; is that it?"

"I have tried to, but, being a good woman, she can't understand. I think I didn't fully understand, myself; but I do now."

"Is it so far beyond reparation?"

"It is indeed. If the devil's emissary who has brought me to this pass could be exorcised this moment I should never recover the lost ground of self-respect. There is nothing to go back to. If I had not to be despicable from necessity, I should doubtless be so from choice."

"I think you are harder with yourself than you would be with another. Can't you begin to believe in yourself again? I believe in you."

"You! – but you don't know what you are saying, Miss Elliott. See!" – his coat was buttoned to the chin, tramp-wise, and he tore it open to show her the rags that underlay it – "do you understand now? I have pawned the shirt off my back – not to satisfy the cravings of hunger, but to feed a baser passion than that of the most avaricious miser that ever lived. Do I make it plain that I am not worthy of your sympathy, or of Richard Bartrow's?"

For once the clear gray eyes were veiled, and her chin quivered a little when she spoke. "You hurt me more than I can tell," she said.

The dull rage of self-abasement in him flamed into passion at the sight of what he had done, but the bitter speech of it tarried at the sound of a heavy step on the stair. Constance rose from her seat in the window embrasure with a nervous thrill of embarrassment, but Jeffard relieved her at once. There was a vacant room on the opposite side of the corridor, and when the intruder appeared at the stair-head, Miss Elliott was alone.

She glanced at the man as he passed, and Jeffard, from his place behind the half-closed door of the vacant room, saw her draw back, and clenched his hands and swore softly, because, forsooth, she had for some fleeting pulse-beat of time to breathe the same air with the intruder. For he knew the man as a purveyor for Peter Grim's house of dishonor; a base thing for which wholesome speech has no name.

What followed was without sequence. Almost at the same instant the footsteps of the man ceased to echo in the empty corridor, there was a cry half angry and half of terror from Margaret Gannon's room, and Miss Elliott disappeared from Jeffard's limited field of vision. In the turning of a leaf Jeffard was at the door of the room in the end of the corridor. What he saw and heard made a man of him for the moment. Margaret Gannon had evidently been surprised at her sewing-machine; the work was still under the needle, and the chair was overturned. Margaret was crouching in the farthest corner of the room, with Miss Elliott standing over her like a small guardian angel at bay. The nameless one had his back to the door, and Jeffard heard only the conclusion of a jeering insult which included both of the women.

Now Jeffard had fasted for twenty-four hours, and the quick dash to the end of the corridor made him dizzy and faint; but red wrath, so it be fierce enough, is its own elixir. Thinking of nothing but that he should acquit himself as a man before the woman he loved, he flung himself upon the contemner of women with the vigor of a righteous cause singing in his veins like the wine of new life.

The struggle was short and decisive. In his college days Jeffard had been a man of his hands, and the fierce onset proved to be the better half of the battle. Constance caught her breath and cowered in the corner with Margaret when the two men went down together, but she gave a glad little cry when she saw that Jeffard had won the fall; that he had wrenched the drawn pistol from the other's grasp and flung it harmless across the room. Then there was another and a fiercer grapple on the floor, and Jeffard's fist rose and fell like a blacksmith's hammer with the dodging head of his antagonist for its anvil.

The end of it was as abrupt as the beginning. In the midst of another wrestling bout the beaten one freed himself, bounded to his feet, and darted into the corridor with Jeffard at his heels. There was a sharp scurry of racing feet in the hall, a prolonged crash as of a heavy body falling down the stair, and Jeffard was back again, panting with the violence of it, but with eyes alight and an apology on his lips.

Constance ran to meet him and cut the apology short.

"The idea!" she protested; "when it was for Margaret's sake and mine! Are you sure you're not hurt?"

Jeffard's knuckles were cut and bleeding, but he kept that hand behind him.

"It's the other fellow who is hurt, I hope." Then to Margaret: "Do you know him? Are you afraid of him?"

Margaret glanced at Constance and hesitated. "He'll not be troubling me any more, I'm thinking. It's Pete Grim that sent him; and he was at me before I knew."

Jeffard picked up the captured weapon and put it on the sewing-machine.

"Take that to him if he comes again when you are alone. Miss Elliott, please stay here a moment until I can go down and see that the way is clear."

He was gone at the word, but he had barely reached the window with the dusty embrasure when she overtook him. There was a sweet shyness in her manner now, and he trembled as he had not in any stage of the late encounter.

"Mr. Jeffard," she began, "will you forgive me if I say that you have disproved all the hard things you were trying to say of yourself? You'll let me wire Dick, now, won't you?"

He shook his head because he was afraid to trust himself to speak. As between an abject appeal with his hopeless passion for its motive, and a plunge back into the abyss of degradation which would efface the temptation, there was nothing to choose.

"You will at least promise me that you will consider it," she went on. "I can't ask less."

If he did not reply immediately it was because he was trying to fix her image so that he should always be able to think of her just as she stood, with the afternoon sunlight falling upon her face, irradiating it and making a shimmering halo of the red-brown hair and deep wells of the clear gray eyes. A vagrant thought came to him: that it was worth a descent into the nether depths to have such a woman seek him out and plead with him for his soul's sake. He put it aside to deny her entreaty.

"I can't promise even that."

She was silent for a moment, and embarrassment came back and fought for holding-ground when she tried to bring herself to do the thing which compassion suggested. But compassion won; and Jeffard looked on with a half-cynical smile when she took a gold coin from her purse and offered it to him.

"Just for the present," she begged, with a beseeching look which might have melted a worse man.

He took the money, and the smile ended in an unpleasant laugh.

"You think I ought to refuse, and so I ought; as any man would who had a spark of manhood left in him. But that is why I take it; I have been trying to make you understand that I am not worth saving. Do I make it plain to you?"

"You make me very sorry," she quavered; and because her sorrow throttled speech, she turned and left him.