His reply came hot from the refining-fire of self-abasement.
"You should write me down as one who wasn't worthy of your loving-kindness and compassion, Miss Grierson. Then you should call the custodian and turn me out."
"But afterward," she persisted pathetically. "There must be an afterward?"
"I am leaving Mereside this evening," he reminded her. "It will be for you to say whether its doors shall ever open to me again."
She took the thin safety-deposit key from her glove and laid it on the table.
"You have made me wish there hadn't been any money," she lamented, with a sorrowful little catch in her voice that stabbed him like a knife. "I haven't so many friends that I can afford to lose them recklessly, Mr. Griswold."
"Damn the money!" he exploded; and the malediction came out of a full heart.
"If you would only say you are sorry," she went on sadly, groping only half-purposefully for the bell-push which would summon the custodian. "You are sorry, aren't you?"
Unconsciously he had taken her former pose, with his back to the wall and his hands behind him.
"I ought to be decent enough to lie to you and say that I am," he returned, hardily. "I know you can't understand; you are too good and innocent to understand. I'm ashamed; that is, the civilized part of me is ashamed; but that is all. Knowing that he ought to be in the dust at your feet, the brutal other-man is unrepentant and riotously jubilant because, for a brief second or two, he was able to break away and——"