If you will follow me—at a distance, for fear I should begin to talk to you again—I'll show you where the gardener's ladder is, and you can put it up against the wall and get out that way."

[29]

"Couldn't I get out where the tramps get in?" he asked, humbly. "I don't like to trouble you."

"Not from here. We should have to pass close by the house."

The "we" gave him courage. "I say—do forgive me," he said.

"There's nothing to forgive," said she.

"Oh, but do," he said, "if you'd only see it! It was just because it was so wonderful and splendid to have met you like this . . . and to have you talk to me as you do to the other tramps."

"You're not a tramp," she said, "and I ought not to have forgotten it."

"But I am," said he, "it's just what I really and truly am."

"Come and get the ladder," said she, and moved toward the wall.

"Not unless you forgive me. I won't," he added, plucking up a little spirit, "be indebted for ladders to people who won't forgive a man because he speaks the truth clumsily."

"Come," she said, looking back over her shoulder.

[30]

[30]

"No," he said, obstinately, not moving. "Not unless you forgive me."

"It can't possibly matter to you whether I forgive you or not," she turned to say it. And as she spoke there came to Edward quite suddenly and quite unmistakably the knowledge that it did matter. Sometimes glimpses do thus suddenly and strangely come to us—and that by some magic inner light that is not reason we know things that by the light of reason we could never know.

"Look here," he said. "I'll go after that ladder in a minute. But first I've got something to say to you. Don't be angry, because I've got to say it. Do you know that just now—just before I said that stupid thing that offended you—you were talking to me as though you'd known 

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