"But what will make him?" I asked, as her studiously impersonal gaze met mine.
"This will," she announced as she held out her hand. I saw then, for the first time, that in this hand she was holding a heavily inscribed and R-stamped envelope.
"What's that?" demanded Criswell, staring hard.
"It's your lost letter," answered Mary Lockwood. "How it fell out, I don't know. But we do know, now, that father shut this letter up in that book. And the Lockwoods, I'm afraid," she continued with an odd little quaver in her voice, "will have a very, very great deal to ask your forgiveness for. I'm sorry, Mr. Criswell, terribly sorry this ever happened. But I'm glad, terribly glad, that it has turned out the way it has."
There was a moment of quite unbroken silence. Then Criswell turned to me.
"It's you I've got to thank for all this," he finally blustered out, with moist yet happy eyes, as he did his best to wring my hand off. "It's you who've—who've reinstated me!"
We were standing there in a sort of triangle, very awkward and ill-at-ease, until I found the courage to break the silence.
"But I don't seem to have been able to reinstate myself, Criswell," I said as I turned and met Mary Lockwood's level gaze. She looked at me out of those intrepid and unequivocating eyes of hers, for a full half minute. Then she turned slowly away. She didn't speak. But there was something that looked strangely like unhappiness in her face as she groped toward the door, which Criswell, I noticed, opened for her.