The girl laid a protesting finger on his lips. "Stop!" she commanded; "I can find fault with you all I please, but I'm the only one. You're not to say a word against yourself, because I won't let you. I wouldn't want you to be any different, my dear, in any possible way—if only you wouldn't make fun of the settlement. That really makes me discouraged, Harry."
Palmer raised his right hand. "I solemnly swear," he cried, with mock seriousness, "that if it bothers you, May, I'll never make fun of it again. Only—and I'm really in earnest about this—I always have believed that there's trouble enough coming every one's way before they've finished the game to keep them busy, and yet here you deliberately go out hunting for it. That's what I can't get through my head."
The girl in her turn grew suddenly grave. "Oh, but Harry," she protested, "we don't have any real troubles, you and I. If you could know some of the things we come across there at the settlement. Just think, last night I heard about the little O'Brien girl, the brightest, prettiest little thing in the whole club; she isn't a day over seventeen, and some brute of a man got her to go off with him in an automobile, and there was wine, of course, and now—now the poor thing's in trouble. Just think of it, Harry. You can't imagine the temptation and all that part of it for girls that haven't good homes. And most men are such beasts. Oh, I've thanked God, Harry, more times than you've ever guessed, that I'm to marry a man that's big and strong and clean and honest. I'm so proud of you, Harry, you don't know how proud."
Fortunately for both, the dim light masked the expression on Palmer's face, and the girl did not mark the sudden spasm of pain that contracted it. Somewhat hastily, it seemed to her, he stooped and kissed her again.
"I'm a brute myself," he said with a faint attempt at humor, "keeping you up till almost midnight. To-morrow night, dear. No, don't come down. Good-night, May, good-night."
Once outside the Sinclairs' home, Palmer strode away down the street, for the first time in his life, perhaps, in an agony of self-abasement. Up to now, his fears and worries had been purely selfish ones. He had done something of which he was ashamed, and in which he did not wish to be found out, and in spite of the payment of hush money and solemn protestations of secrecy in return, he had felt that he was treading on the edge of a slumbering volcano. Now, however, May Sinclair's parting words had for once awakened his dormant moral sense, and he flushed hotly at the thought that the kisses he had given the pure girl who believed him all that was true had been but a short twenty-four hours before lavished in a mad burst of passion upon another.
With all his faults, Palmer was kind. Horses and dogs were his friends. Small children, oftentimes to his great embarrassment, made much over him. Kind—and weak, he was never cast to play the villain in life's drama; betrayals of friendship, premeditated deception, even injury to the feelings of another, none of these things was natural to him, and his love for May Sinclair, all unknown to him, was working and striving to rouse the finer sense sleeping within him far beneath the crust of ignorance and selfishness and sloth.
Thus, in repentant, self-contemptuous mood, he reached the entrance of his big house on the avenue, and in moody silence unlocked the door and entered the quiet hall. At once, to his surprise, a silent figure came forward to meet him, and, peering through the half-light, he recognized the figure of his secretary.
"Hullo, Morton," he exclaimed in surprise, "what's the trouble now?"
The secretary advanced with an air of caution. "There's a young woman waiting in the reception-room to see you, sir," he said in a low tone. "She's been here since ten o'clock, and she seems to be an uncommonly determined sort of person. In fact, she was too much for me, altogether. I couldn't get rid of her. She insists she's got to see you."