which impelled a pure outspokenness to himself. Reserve, of course,
there had been elsewhere, for did not she hold a secret with him? Had
she not hidden things, equivocated else where? Yet it had been at his
wish, to protect the name of a dead man, for the repose of whose soul
masses were now said, with expensive candles burning. For this she had
no repentance; she was without logic where this man's good was at stake.

Charley had before him a problem, which he now knew he never could evade
in the future. He could solve it by none of the old intellectual means,
but by the use of new faculties, slowly emerging from the unexplored
fastnesses of his nature.

"Why should you believe in me?" he asked, forcing himself to smile, yet
acutely alive to the fact that a crisis was impending. "You, like all
down there in Chaudiere, know nothing of my past, are not sure that I
haven't been a hundred times worse than you think poor Jo there. I may
have been anything. You may be harbouring a man the law is tracking
down."

In all that befell Rosalie Evanturel thereafter, never could come such
another great resolute moment. There was nothing to support her in the
crisis but her own faith. It needed high courage to tell this man who
had first given her dreams, then imagination, hope, and the beauty of
doing for another's well-being rather than for her own--to tell this man
that he was a suspected criminal. Would he hate her? Would his kindness
turn to anger? Would he despise her for even having dared to name the
suspicion which was bringing hither an austere Abbe and officers of the
law?

"We are harbouring a man the law is tracking down," she said with an