You, of course, can’t realize how essential a little ready money sometimes is in a period of financial depression; but Henry left a note which gave me an awful shock, while, at the same time, it made clear Miss Wildmere’s scheme.  She had simply put me off, that she might hear from Wall Street.  If Henry had failed she would have decided for Arnault, and I believe my attentions led to his tricky transaction—­that he loaned the money and called it in when he believed that Henry could not meet his demand.  I must be put out of his way, for he reasoned justly that the girl would drop me if impoverished.  Thus indirectly I might have caused Henry’s failure—­a blow from which I should never have recovered.  Henry is safe now, he assures me; and, oh, Madge, thank God, I have found her out before it was too late!  I had fully resolved while oft trouting that I would break with her finally if I found Arnault at her side again.  Now he may marry her, for all I care, and I wish him no worse punishment.  I shall go to my room now and write to her that everything is over between us.  The fact is, Madge, you spoiled Miss Wildmere for me on that morning drive the other day.  After leaving your society and going into hers I felt the difference keenly, and while I should then have fulfilled the obligations which I had so stupidly incurred, I had little heart in the affair.  Her acting was consummate, but a true woman’s nature had been revealed to me, and the glamour was gone from the false one.  Now you see what absolute confidence I repose in you, and how heavily this strange story bears against myself.  Could I have given it to any one for whom I had not a brother’s love, and in whom I did not hope to find a sister’s gentle charity?  I show you how unspent is the force of all those years when we had scarcely a thought which we could not tell each other.  I have little claim, though, to be a protecting brother, when I have been making such an egregious fool of myself.  You have grown wiser and stronger than I. You won’t think very harshly of me, will you, Madge?”

“No, Graydon.”

“And you won’t condemn my fraternal affection as contrary to nature?”

She was sorely at a loss.  She had listened with quickened breath, a fluttering pulse, and in a growing tumult of hope and fear, to this undisguised revelation of his attitude toward her.  She almost thought that she detected between the lines, as it were, the beginning of a different regard.  He believed that he had been frankness itself, and his words proved that he looked upon his fraternal affection and confidence as the natural, the almost inevitable, sequence of the past.  She could not meet him on the fraternal ground that he was taking again, nor did she wish him to occupy it in his own mind.  To maintain the attitude which she had adopted would require as much delicacy as firmness of action, or he would begin to query why she could not go back to their old relations as readily as he could.  She had listened to the twice-told tale of the events of the past few days with almost breathless interest, because his words revealed the workings of his own mind, and she had not the least intention of permitting him to settle down into the tranquil affection of a brother.