As Rankin broke the news to Margaret—by degrees and very quietly—she showed but little sign of feeling. Her face whitened and she moved stiffly to the open window, where she could sit in the draught. As she made Rankin tell her the whole story she simply grew stony, while she sat with bloodless hands clinched together, as if she thus clutched at her soul to save it from the madness of a terrible grief.

Suddenly she interrupted him.

"Dismiss your cab," she said. "I will walk back with you part of the way."

When she turned toward him, the strained face was so white and the eyes so wide and expressionless that he became afraid.

"Perhaps you would rather be alone," said he, doubtful about letting her go into the street.

She seemed to divine what was in his mind, for she made him feel more at ease by a gentler tone:

"Alone? No, no! Anything but that! The walk will do me good."

The cab was dismissed while she put on her hat, and as they walked through the quiet streets toward the heart of the city, he went on with all the particulars, which she seemed determined to hear. Several times they met people who knew her and knew of her engagement to Hampstead, and they were surprised to see her walking with—of all men—Maurice Rankin. But she saw no one, gazing before her with the look which means madness if the mind be not diverted. Suddenly, as they had to cross one of the main arteries of the city, a sound fell upon Margaret's ear that made her stop and grasp Rankin by the arm. Then the cry came again—from a boy running toward them along the street:

"Special edition of the Evening News! All about Geoffrey Hampstead, the bank robber!"

For a moment her grasp came near tearing a piece out of Rankin's arm. But this was only when the blow struck her. She stopped the boy and bought a paper. She gave him half a dollar and walked on.

"This will do to give them at home," she said simply. "I could not tell them myself."

But the blow was too much for her. To hear the name of the man she worshiped yelled through the streets as a bank robber's was more than she felt able to bear. She must get home now. Another experience of this kind, and something would happen.

"Good-by!" she said, as she stopped abruptly at the corner of a street. Not a vestige of a tear had been seen in her eyes. "I will go home now. You have been very kind. I forgive you for—"

She turned quickly, and Rankin stood and watched her as she passed rapidly away.

No. 173 Tremaine Buildings had become slightly better furnished since the opening of this story. Between the time when he made the cruise in the Ideal and the events recorded in the preceding chapters, Rankin had contributed somewhat to his comforts in an inexpensive way. In order to buy his coal, which he did now with much satisfaction, he had still to practice the strictest economy. But he took some pleasure in his solitary existence. From time to time he bought different kinds of preserves sold in pressed-glass goblets and jugs of various sizes. After the jam was consumed the prize in glassware would be washed by Mrs. Priest and added to his collection, and there was a keen sense of humor in him when he added each terrible utensil to his stock. "A poor thing—but mine own!" he would quote, as he bowed to an imaginary audience and pointed with apologetic pride to a hideous pressed-glass butter-bolt.

In buying packages of dusty, doctored, and detestable tea he acquired therewith a collection of gift-spoons of different sizes, and also knives, forks, and plates, which, if not tending to develop a taste for high art, were useful. At a certain "seven-cent store" he procured, for the prevailing price, articles in tinware, the utility of which was out of all proportion to the cost.

Thus, when he sat down of an evening and surveyed a packing-box filled with several sacks of coal, all paid for; when he viewed the collection of glassware, the "family plate," and the very desirable cutlery; when he gazed with pride upon his seven-cent treasures and his curtains of chintz at ten cents a mile; when he considered that all these were his very own, his sense of having possessions made him less communistic and more conservative. Primitively, a Conservative was a being who owned something, just as Darwin's chimpanzee in the "Zoo," who discovered how to break nuts with a stone and hid the stone, was a Tory; the other monkeys who stole it were necessarily Reformers.

About ten o'clock on the evening of the trial Rankin was sitting among his possessions sipping some "gift-spoon" tea. Around him were three evening papers and two special editions. The "startling developments" and "unexpected changes" which had "transpired" at the Victoria Bank had made the special editions sell off like cheap peaches, and Rankin was enjoying the weakness—pardonable in youth and not unknown to maturity—of reading each paper's account of himself and the trial. They spoke of his "acuteness" and "foresight," and commented on his being the sole means of recovering the forty-eight thousand dollars. One paper must have jumped at a conclusion when it called him "a well-known and promising young lawyer—one of the rising men at the bar."

"The tide has turned," he said. "Twenty cents a day is not going to cover my total expenses after this. I feel it in my bones that the money will come pouring in now." He was mechanically filling a pipe when a rap at the door recalled him from his dream. A tall Scotchman, whom Rankin recognized as the messenger of the Victoria Bank, handed him a letter and then felt around for the stairs in the darkness, and descended backward, on his hands and knees, for fear of accidents.

A pleasing letter from the manager of the Victoria Bank inclosed one of the recovered thousand-dollar bills.

Rankin sat down. "I shall never," he said, with an air of resolve, "steal any more coal! And now I'll have a cigar, three for a quarter, and blow the expense!"

Two weeks afterward there came to him a copy of a resolution passed by the bank directors, together with a notification that they had arranged with the bank solicitors, Messrs. Godlie, Lobbyer, Dertewercke, and Toylor, to have him taken in as a junior partner.

Immediately after Geoffrey was sentenced, Jack Cresswell was, of course, discharged. A dozen hands were being held out to congratulate him, when Detective Dearborn drew him through a side door into an empty room, where they had a short talk about keeping the name of Nina Lindon from the public, and then they departed together for Tremaine Buildings in a cab, while the two valises in front looked, like their owner, none the better for their vicissitudes. Dearborn felt that little could be said to mend the trouble he had caused Jack, but he did all he could, and there was certainly nothing hard-hearted in the care with which the redoubtable detective assisted his former victim to bed. Mrs. Priest was summoned, also a doctor. Jack was found to be worse than he thought, and Patsey was ordered to remain within call in the next room, where he consumed cigars at twelve dollars the hundred throughout the night.

The next day Mrs. Mackintosh and Margaret came down in a cab to Jack's lonely quarters, and insisted upon his being moved to their house during his illness. While unable to go home to his parents at Halifax he was loath to give trouble to his friends, and made excuses, until he saw that Margaret really wished him to come, and divined that his coming might be a relief to her.

It was so. In the weeks that followed, whatever these two suffered in the darkness and solitude of the nights, during the day-time they were brave. The heart of each knew its own bitterness. In a short time Jack found the comfort of speech in telling Margaret many things. Unavoidably Geoffrey's name came up, for he was entangled in both their lives. Little by little Jack's story came out, as he lay back weakly on his couch, until, warmed by Margaret's sympathy, he told her all about Nina and himself—so far as he knew the story—and in the presence of his manifold troubles, and at the thought of his suffering when he witnessed, as a captive, Nina's death, Margaret felt that she was in the presence of one who had known even greater grief than her own. This was good for her. After a while she was able to speak to Jack about Geoffrey, and this brought them more and more together.

When he got well, his breach of duty in going away without notice was overlooked, and he was taken back to his old post. There he worked on as the years rolled by. Country managerships were offered to him, and declined. He had nothing to make money for, and the only thing he really enjoyed was Margaret's society, in which he would talk about Nina and Geoffrey without restraint. For many years he remained ignorant that his marriage with Nina was, after all, for New York State a valid one, since marriage by simple contract, without religious ceremony, is sufficient in that State. He never dreamed Geoffrey had been indirectly the cause of his life's ruin, and always spoke of him as a man almost without blame. However unreasonable, there are, among all the faulty emotions, few more beautiful than a man's affection for a man. When it exists, it is the least exacting attachment of his life.

Margaret listened to his superlatives about Geoffrey. She listened; but as the years passed on she grew wiser. When walking in the open fields, or perhaps beside the wide lake, an image would come to her in gladsome colors, in matchless beauty—a Greek god with floating hair and full of resolve and victory, and in her dreams she would see and talk with him, and would find him grave and thoughtful and tender, and all that a man could be. Then would come the rending of the heart. This was a thief who had decoyed his friend, and, good or bad, was lost to her.

And thus time passed on. For two or three years she went nowhere. She tried going into society, after Geoffrey's sentence, thinking to obtain relief in change of thought, but the experiment was a failure. She found that she had not the elasticity of temperament which can doff care and don gayety as society demands. So she gave up the attempt for years, and then went again only at her mother's solicitation. She said she had her patients at the hospital, her studies with her father, her many books to read, her long walks with Jack and Maurice Rankin, and what more did she want?

She did not hear of Geoffrey. The six years of his imprisonment had dragged themselves into the past, and she supposed he was free again, if he had not died in the penitentiary. But nothing was heard of him, and thus the time rolled on, while Margaret's mother secretly wept to see her daughter's early bloom departing, while no hope of any happy married life seemed possible to her.

Grave, pleasant, studious, thoughtful, as the years rolled by, she went on with her hospital work. From the depths of the grief into which she was plunged, she could discern some truths that might have remained unknown if her life had continued sunny—just as at noonday from the bottom of a deep pit or well the stars above us can be seen. To her the bitterness of her life was medicinal. Speaking chemically, it was like the acid of the unripe apple acting upon the starch in it to make a sugar—thus to perfect a sweet maturity. She was one of the richly endowed women in whom sensitiveness and strength combine peculiarly for either superlative joy or sorrow, and hers was a grief which, for her, nothing but tending the bed of sickness seemed to mitigate. Many a bruised heart was healed, gladdened, and bewitched by the angel smile on the sweet firm, full lips which could quiver with compassion. There are some smiles, given for others, when grief has made thought for self unbearable, which nothing but a descent into hell and glorious rising again could produce.