“Don’t be sorry for me!” she protested. “And I am glad I suffered. I ought to have. And I feel as if I should just die when I think of how I acted to you. I thought—O, Mr. Meadowcroft, I just kept my mind on June, else I never could have borne it or gone on. And now—now there isn’t any June!”
“O, my dear Betty, but there is a June! I trust there’s many and many a June before you!” he cried. “After all, you have a good deal to sustain you at this very minute. You thought you were doing right, and certainly you acted unselfishly. You made a mistake. Your premises were false, but you were unaware of that, and all the while you were striving and suffering for what you believed a holy cause. You chose what you believed to be the greater good—the greatest good, indeed, the veritable summum bonum—and you sinned against formal law in your pursuit of it. You did wrong not unconsciously but wholly for another and with the zeal and courage of a martyr. You have learned your error, but don’t reproach yourself further. Lack of judgment is all that a more severe judge than I could charge you with. For my part—” he smiled that rare, charming smile peculiar to him—“I have nothing but admiration for you. The generous, suicidal audacity you showed has all the magnificence of a forlorn hope.”
Tears filled her eyes. Her lips trembled pitifully as she tried to smile.
“I ought to have had more sense,” she declared.
“I’m not so sure. You’re not yet fourteen and you had never come in contact with duplicity before. And doubtless that scamp was plausible?”
She raised her eyes quickly.
“O, he was—I mean he seemed so scientific,” she returned ingenuously. “It seemed to stretch your mind to take in his explanations. And really, he seemed just to long to cure Rose, partly because he loved his profession and partly because he wanted her to be happy.”
“His insistence upon the fee didn’t bother you?”
“Sometimes just a wee bit at first. Then I felt that he wanted to make sure of our never missing a week and believed we wouldn’t be so likely to if we had sort of hard work scraping together the money, you know,” she explained.
He smiled. “Now that, Betty, is sound psychology. If you could have only been as reasonable in other directions!” he exclaimed. “You know, your great mistake was in promising to keep it all secret. It almost seems as if you ought to have known better than that. And when I think of all you went through—of all you might have been saved——”