Her first effort would carry her no further. He nodded.
She clutched the arms of her chair, breathed deeply, and drove herself on. "You should not have lost it. I have come to bring you—to ask you to let me return to you"—a brown-gloved hand drew a roll of bills from the bag in her lap "this money that belongs to you."
She held the elastic-bound roll out to him. His interlocked hands did not move from his lap.
"I don't just understand," he said slowly. "You mean that this money is the equivalent of what I should have made in the land deal?"
"Yes."
His face tinged faintly with red, his bright eyes (he had discarded glasses, now that a disguise no longer served him) darted quick flames, and he leaned toward her.
"Do you think I can take as a gift that which I honestly earned?" he demanded in a low, fierce voice.
"But it is not offered as a gift. It is restitution."
"Restitution! So you want to make restitution? Can you restore the strength despair has taken from me? My good name was built on deception, but I had worked hard for it and it was dear to me. Can you restore my good name? I've lost everything! Can you restore everything?"
The ringing bitterness of his voice, the wasted face working with the passion of despair, the utter hopelessness of the future which her quick vision showed her—all these stirred a great emotion which swept her father from her mind. Before, she had sympathised with Rogers abstractly; now her sympathy was for a hopeless soul, bare and agonising beneath her eyes.