"Oh, it was not you; it was I who did it!" she said.

"You did what any man of honour would have done, what a brother would have done." "What I did is a matter for myself only," he responded quickly.

"Had I never seen your face again it would have been the same.

You were the occasion; the thing I did had only one source, my own heart and mind.
There might have been another way; but for that way, or for the way I did take, you could not be responsible." "How generous you are!" Her eyes swam with tears; she leaned over the table where he had been writing, and the tears dropped upon his letter.
Presently she realised this, and drew back, then made as though to dry the tears from the paper with her handkerchief.

As she did so the words that he had written met her eye: "'But offences must come, and woe to him from whom the offence cometh!' I have begun now, and only now, to feel the storms that shake us to our farthest cells of life." She became very still.