"A sorry hero," he answered, not understanding what she meant.
"No. No. It was fine! It was fine!"
He was bewildered.
"You don't mean to say you have n't seen the papers—but then, of course, you have n't, if you were asleep all day Sunday. Please bring me that pile in the corner."
He handed them to her and she unfolded the first page of the uppermost paper. He found himself confronting a picture of himself as he had stood, the centre of an admiring crowd, in front of the big machine which had so nearly killed Bobby.
He shared the first page with the latest guesses concerning the Riverside robberies.
"Well," he stammered, "I 'd forgotten all about that!"
"Forgotten such an act! You don't half realize what a hero you are. Listen to the headlines, 'Heroic Rescue,' 'Young Lawyer Gives Remarkable Exhibition of Nerve,' 'The Name of Lawyer Donaldson Mentioned for Carnegie Medal,' 'Bravest Deed of the Year,' 'Faced Death Unflinchingly.'"
And the pitiful feature of it was that he must sit and listen to this undeserved praise from her lips. That, knowing deep in his heart his own unworthiness, he must face her and see her respond to those things as though he really had been worthy. He, who had done the act under oath, was receiving the reward of a man who would have done it with no false stimulus. He, who had been unconsciously braced to it by the fact that he had so little to lose, was receiving the praise due only a man who risks all the happiness of a long life. He had faced death after flinching from life. He was sick of his hypocrisy; he would be frank with himself. He would be frank with her; he had a right to it this once. He pressed down the paper she was reading.
"Don't repeat it," he commanded. "It is n't true! It's all wrong!"