"You care a good deal for him, Jack! And yet he did not use you nobly," with a peculiar regret in the tone. "It is the one thing"—
"Sylvie, if I forgave it, surely you can." Then he turned his eyes upon her, and read or rather dreamed of something in a dim, dazed way, the story of a bygone summer. Had it been more to her than any one thought? Miss Barry had hinted to his mother that Sylvie's decision in the matter was a great disappointment to her. There had been a decision, then, and one adverse to Fred Lawrence.
"I hate a false and cowardly man!" her cheeks were flaming now. "And when you were schoolboys together,—when Agatha and Gertrude were so afraid he would lower himself if he looked at any boy below his own social position,—he used to stand up for you,—yes, he did,—and fight; of course not in a brutal way with fists," and she laughed at her own conceit, "but in that higher, finer manner, with no shield or weapon save his love for you. I used to like to see you together,—you so sturdy and manful and true, and he delicate and handsome and adoring. And then"—
"Sylvie, I wonder if a woman can understand a man's friendship. We never had any quarrel. We just drifted apart. I don't believe we forgot each other. Circumstances took him out of my sphere, into a new one. If I had been there in college, going along with him step by step, don't you suppose he would have stood up for me in the face of his fine friends, just as he used to with his sisters?"
"I hope so: I would like to believe it."
"I am more just to him than you, Sylvie," said Jack, a little wounded. "I know it. I don't doubt it any more than I doubt—well, myself. He might have come—I was always sorry to see him avoid me, and I think he was weak, but he never forgot."
"He was weak, he was worse, Jack." There was a curious cry of anguish in her voice, and her shoulders swayed unconsciously, while her eyes looked out on the summer night he could not see.
"Don't get so excited over it, Sylvie," and the pleasant, cheery laugh seemed to bring healing on its wings. "Whatever it was, and we will let all that go, he made the amende honorable the night we had tea together up there in the great house. We took up our friendship just where it had dropped. Men never go over those crooked and thorny steps of the past, they have so much work to do in the present and the future. I wanted then to make a position for him in the mill; but it was not possible, and would not have been the part of wisdom under any circumstances. Yet it seemed as if I had stepped in his place. I was glad to hear of this other, though Fred would have been happier elsewhere. Sylvie, I do not believe you realize what it cost him to come back to Yerbury, to walk about, a working-man, where he had driven in his carriage. So down at the bottom there is the temper of the real blue steel, which can bend."
"How generous you are, Jack!" There was something more than admiration in her tone, and yet she was wondering if she could ever forgive her fallen hero.
"See here, Sylvie, I don't mean to question any one's religion, but I've often thought about the rejoicing up above, over the one who went astray. I do not believe we rejoice with a very full heart: maybe we are not heavenly enough. We can never be sure of our own strength until some far-reaching test is applied, and yet it may not be an entirely true test. It may quiver about the weak spot in our souls; but, while there is any feeling, one cannot be entirely lost. That is why I say he never forgot. And you and I ought to rejoice that he did come back instead of going off in that gloomy, diseased, Manfred style, and upbraiding the world. 'Whatever his hand found to do'—that was one of grandmother's texts, and he went bravely at it."