"But you were never like Dick!" she protested.
"Yes," he continued passionately, "and but for God's help I should be like him still. It was an awful pull, and Heaven only knows how I struggled. I never quite saw the use of it all, until I met you six months ago; then I realized that the past four years had been given me in which to make a man of myself."
As he finished speaking he saw, for the first time, that Lucy was crying. He sprang forward, but she shrank away. "No, no, don't touch me! I'm so terribly disappointed, and hurt, and—stunned."
"But you surely don't love me the less for having conquered these things in the past?"
"I don't know, I don't know," she said, with a sob. "I honored and idealized you, Robert I can never think of you as being other than you are now."
"But why should you?" he pleaded. "It was only one year out of my life; too much, it's true, but I have atoned for it with all my might."
The intensity and earnestness of his voice were beginning to influence her. She was very young, with the stern, uncompromising standards of girlhood; life was black or white to her, and time had not yet filled in the canvas with the myriad grays that blend into one another until all lines are effaced, and only the Master Artist knows the boundaries.
She looked up through her tears. "I'll try to forgive you," she said, tremulously; "but you must promise to give up your friendship for Dick Harris."
Redding frowned and bit his lip. "That's not fair!" he said. "You know Dick's my chum; that he hasn't the least influence over me; that I am about the only one to stand by him."
"I am not afraid of his influence, but I don't want people to see you together; it makes them say things."