"That is good in you, Mantel. How much nobility lies buried in every human heart! It may be that even such men as you and I are capable of some sort of rescue and redemption. I am going to spend my best strength in working for this poor old blind beggar whom I have wronged. I mean to toil for him like a galley slave, and mark me, Mantel, it is going to be honest toil!"
"Honest, did you say?" asked Mantel, lifting his eyebrows incredulously.
"Yes," David answered, "honest. This hope that has come to me has wrought a great change in my heart. It has revived old feelings which I thought long dead. If there is a God in heaven who has decided to give me one more chance to set myself right, I am going to take it! And listen; if this great hope can come to me, why not to you?"
Mantel leaned his head on his hand a moment, and then answered with a sigh, "Perhaps—but," and paused.
There are moments when these two indefinite words contain the whole of our philosophy of existence. "I am going to seek the great Perhaps!" said Rabelais, as he breathed his last.
David looked at him sympathetically and said, "Well, it is not strange that you cannot feel as I do. It is not by what befalls others, but by what befalls ourselves, that we learn to hope and trust."
The silence that came between them was broken by Mantel, who looked up at him with a trace of the old ironical smile on his face.
"Your plans are all right as far as they go, but it seems to me the hardest part of the tangle still remains to be unraveled."
"What do you mean?" asked David.
"What are you going to do about this beautiful Pepeeta?"