"Dear Elaine," he said hoarsely, "you see a man who is going to be a better man to you."
"To yourself, Ben,--be better to yourself! Are you going to be that?"
"That is the way,--by being a man to you and to the others."
"The unseen others. You must get Donaldson to tell you about the others."
She grasped his wrist with both her hands, looking up at him intently. Where was the change? A photograph would not have shown all the change. Yet it was there. Nor was this a temporal reformation based upon cowardly remorse. It showed too calm, too big an impulse for that. It was so sincere, so deep, that it did not need words to express it.
"I believe you, Ben," she said, "I believe you with all my heart and soul."
In the words he realized the divine that is in all women, the eagerness that is Christ-like in its eternal hunger to seize upon the good in man. He stooped again and with religious reverence kissed the white space above her eyes.
"We 'll not talk about it much, shall we?" he said. "I want you to believe only as I go on from day to day. I 've some big plans that I thought up on the way home. Some day we 'll talk those over, but not now. Donaldson is downstairs."
He saw the color sweep her face. It suggested to him something that he had not yet suspected. It came to him like a new revelation of sunlight.
He smiled. It was the smile of the father which she had so long missed, the smile that always greeted her when his sad heart was fullest of hope and gladness. It was so he used to smile when at twilight he stood at her side, his long thin arm over her shoulder and talked of Ben with a new hope born of his own victory.
"I was going to tell you," he said tenderly, "I was going to tell you of what a big fine fellow this Donaldson is. But--perhaps you know."
She refused not to meet her brother's eyes.
He took her hand, seating himself on the arm of her chair, the other arm resting affectionately across her shoulders. So the father had sometimes sat.
"So," she answered, starting a little, "not as you mean. But tell me about him--tell me all about him, Ben."
"It's just this; that I owe everything in the world to him. I owe my life to him; I owe," his voice lowered, "I owe my soul to him. You ought to have heard him talk. But it was n't talking, it wasn't preaching. I don't know what it was, unless--unless it was praying. Yet it was n't like that either. He got inside me and made me talk to myself. It was the first time words ever meant anything to me--that they ever got a hold on me. You 've talked, little sister, Lord knows how often, and how deep from the heart, but somehow, dear, nothing of it sank in below the brain. I understood as in a sort of dream. Sometimes I even remembered it for a little, but that was all.
