As her hand indicated the two young people talking together confidentially as if lovers, his heart smote him.
Eweretta, pale and beautiful, calm as one who knows there is nothing left to hope for, moved him as he had never before been moved. He also felt an intense self-pity. If anyone had ever loved him as Eweretta had loved that man, he might not have been what he was.
“Eweretta, I am—sorry for you,” was all he found to say.
But the tone in which he spoke was one the girl had never before heard from him.
With ready sympathy she extended her hand to the man who had so wronged her.
“No! no!” he exclaimed. “I can’t! Eweretta, I have been a brute to you.”
“Let us forget it, uncle. Let us forget it all,” cried the girl, genuinely touched. “You never had a chance. You never had a friend. I will care for you.”
Never in the whole course of his life had Thomas Alvin had sympathy shown him before, and now it came from his victim—the girl he had defrauded of all.
It was as if a soul had agonized birth in him at that moment.
Such a divine forgiveness!