For moments that seemed hours Shirley and Murgatroyd stood facing each other, neither having the courage to speak, the girl filled with shame at the great wrong she had done to the man she loved; while he, feeling as if the burden that had rested upon his soul had at last rolled away, was drawing deep breaths—breathing like a man who has suddenly come out of darkness into the daylight. Shirley was the first to break the silence; and now looking up at Murgatroyd, with a little shake of the head she asked:—
"Billy, do you care to know what I think of you?"
"Perhaps, if I had cared less, I——"
But not for a moment would Shirley listen now to his censuring himself further, and quickly she cut him off.
"I think it was a far finer thing to take the money and not touch it," she declared with true feminine logic, "than never to have taken it at all."
"But what if this habit should grow upon me," he retorted smilingly. "Evidently Miss Bloodgood doesn't know what graft awaits me in Washington?"
Shirley laughed softly.
"To think that you accomplished all this without money," she said happily.
"But the worst is yet to come," he observed quickly. "It means that one has to keep up the social game, the club game, the political game, and the Lord knows what other games on five thousand—or is it now seventy-five hundred a year? It means that an unmarried man must starve; and Heaven help the married senator! For he and his family must live on a back street in the capital and freeze. That's what it means to a senator who lives on his salary."
"But doesn't poverty always travel hand in hand with greatness," she remarked enthusiastically, and with superb disdain for anything that she may have said heretofore to the contrary.