“I often wanted to warn you,” Mrs. Errol said.  “But I thought—­I hoped—­it was unnecessary.  You were always so kind of frank with him that I thought maybe it would be an impertinence to say anything.  It wasn’t as if you were an inexperienced girl.  If you had been—­but to give him his due, Nap never tried to trap inexperience.  He’s got some morals, knave as he is.  Say, Anne dear, you know he is no son of mine?”

“Yes,” whispered Anne, gently drawing her friend’s hand round her neck.

“And I sometimes wonder,” Mrs. Errol went on, in her deep sing-song voice that yet somehow held a note of pathos, “if I did wrong to take him as I did.  He was the quaintest baby, Anne—­the cutest morsel you ever saw.  His dying mother brought him to me.  She was only a girl herself—­a broken-hearted girl, dying before her time.  I couldn’t refuse.  I felt he had a sort of claim upon us.  Maybe I was wrong.  My husband didn’t view it that way, but at that time I hadn’t much faith in his judgment.  So I took the boy—­his boy—­and he was brought up as one of my own.  But he was always unaccountable.  He had queer lapses.  I tried to be kind to him.  I guess I always was kind.  But I surmise that he always suspected me of resenting his existence.  Lucas was the only one who ever had any influence over him.  Latterly I’ve thought you had some too, but I guess that was where I went wrong.  He and Bertie never got on.  P’r’aps it was my fault.  P’r’aps he inherited some of my antagonism.  The Lord knows I tried to suppress it, but somehow it was always there.”

“Dear Mrs. Errol!” Anne murmured softly.  “Not one woman in a thousand would have done as much.”

“Oh, you mustn’t say that, dearie.  I’m a very poor specimen.  I gave him what advantages I could, but I never loved him.  P’r’aps if I had, he’d have been a better boy.  It’s only love that counts for anything in God’s sight, and I never gave him any.  Lucas did.  That’s how it is he knows how to manage him.  It isn’t personal magnetism or anything of that sort.  It’s just love.  He can’t help answering to that, because it’s Divine.”

“Ah!” breathed Anne.  “You think him capable of love then?”

“I guess so, dear.  He’s raw and undeveloped, but like the rest of creation he has his possibilities.  You’ve seen him in his better moods yourself.  I always thought he kept his best side for you.”

“I know,” Anne said.  She leaned slowly back, looking up into the kindly eyes above her.  “But it was only a mask.  I see it now.  I think there are many men like that, perhaps all are to a certain extent.  They are only themselves to one another.  No woman would ever love a man if she saw him as he is.”

“My dear!  My dear!” Mrs. Errol said.  “That’s a bitter thing to say.  And it isn’t true either.  You’ll see better by-and-by.  Men are contemptible, I own—­the very best of them; but they’ve all got possibilities, and it’s just our part to draw them out.  It’s the divine foolishness of women’s love that serves their need, that makes them feel after better things.  No woman ever won a man by despising him.  He may be inferior—­he is—­but he wants real love to bolster him up.  I guess the dear Lord thought of that when He fashioned women.”