“You know him! You have seen him?” she queried in a low, deliberate voice.
“Yes,” I answered.
“You know he is disfigured?”
I could barely answer again, “Yes.”
“When I tell you, then, that I am the cause of that, will you deny me the privilege of any reparation I can make?”
The words met me like a blow in the face. I was crushed! God knows what I would have done but that I saw the flame of colour that leapt into her face, and the trembling and quivering of her lips. I gasped out:
“No, no! I will do it.”
She seemed so upset, so unsteady, that I made a half-step towards her, but she motioned me back, saying:
“Go now—go! Please go, and leave me.” A hundred thoughts were surging and churning in my head as I drove down the long, long valley of the Lampogwana River that night. I felt as miserable as man need feel. Everything seemed wrong—most of it horribly so—but turn as I might from one phase to another, the one thing always recurred, pervading, dominating everything: “I am the cause of that.” The words rang in my ears again and again, and the horrible significance shamed me afresh each time, always to be answered by something which said, “No, I will believe! I will trust!”
Poor Cassidy was very, very bad when I reached him, and his lucid intervals were far between. His appearance was terrible, the ghastly pallor adding, as I had thought nothing could add, to the face from which one eye, the nose, half the upper lip, and portion of one cheek, were gone. It was terrible—truly terrible!