"No?" she replied. "I have known it some time, having seen you several times at Mass and Benediction. I do not believe you would make the sign of the cross unless you held it to be the sign of salvation. And you do make it, I think."
"No doubt the discovery surprised you, Miss Foster," I continued.
"No, it did not," she answered. "I did not think the change would be accomplished so soon, but I hoped great things for you."
"Even when you accused me most bitterly?" Why tread on dangerous ground; but the words were spoken, and I could not recall them.
"Even when I accused you most bitterly," she said, in a low tone.
"You are far-sighted, I perceive. Perhaps you may also have some idea of the manner in which this change was brought about. Perhaps I may have felt, may still feel, an indebtedness to some one, to whom it has been a matter of doubt with me as to whether I should acknowledge the obligation, or suffer it to go unpaid."
"I may have an idea," she replied, "yet not just such a one as that to which you make allusion. Some one may have been instrumental in awakening thought on the subject. But I have not been able to advance the idea further."
For a moment I sat silent. "Shall I tell her what she has done for me?" I asked myself; "shall I open the old wound and let it bleed afresh? Will it be any sacrifice of my manliness if I tell her what a few moments ago I held it my duty and purpose to conceal?"
I drew my gaze from the fire and directed it toward her. The ivory needle flew in and out between her slender fingers; it seemed she had a task to do. My resolve was taken. But there was not the shadow of a hope in my soul when I spoke. Something impelled me—something, I knew not what; a desperate spirit, I thought it then; my good angel, I know now.
"There is a debt and an obligation," I began, "and an acknowledgment which I am proud to make, although the fact of its existence be almost death to me. A little more than two years ago, circumstances led to the revelation of that which but for those circumstances might have been unrevealed to-day. I offered you a love that had grown in my heart until it interpenetrated every fibre of my being. You rejected it; and that you did so, or why, I find no fault or blame. The folly was mine; I alone have borne the consequences. But while you disabused my mind of any wild hope it might have cherished in moments quite as wild, you told me some unpalatable truths. Until I met you I had lived a selfish, useless life. After I met you, the germs of something better in me stirred now and then, and impulses that I more than once fought down knocked at secret doors where the dust and cobwebs of the world had gathered. Then the dénouement came, and after it the change in me."