"Ask them to send you to prison, Lois?"
"To send me to my father, dear."
Alban sat very silent, almost ashamed for himself and his own desires. The stupendous sacrifice of which she spoke so lightly revealed to him a page in the story of human sympathy which he had often read and as often derided. Here in the prison cell he stood face to face with human love as Wonderland knew nothing of it. Supreme above all other desires of her life, this desire to save her father, to share his sorrows, to stand by him to the end, prevailed. The riches of the world could not purchase a devotion as precious, or any fine philosophy belittle it. He knew that she would go to Petersburg because Paul Boriskoff, her father, had need of her. This was her answer to his selfish complaints during the years of their exile.
"And what am I to do if they give you the permission, Lois?"
"To go back to London and marry Anna Gessner. Won't you do that, Alban?"
"You know that I shall never do so."
"There was a time when you would not have said that, my dear."
He was greatly troubled, for the accusation was very just. The impossibility of making the whole truth plain to her had stared him in the face since the moment of her pathetic confession when he met her on the barge. Impossible to say to her, "I had an ideal and pursued it, looking to the right and the left for the figure of the vision and suffering it to escape me all the time." This he could not tell her or even hint at. The lie cried for a hearing, and the lie was detestable to him.
"There was a time, yes, Lois," he said, turning his face from her, "I am ashamed to remember it now, since you have spoken. If you love me, you would understand what all the wonders of Mr. Gessner's house meant to a poor devil, brought up as I had been. It was another world with strange people everywhere. I thought they were more than human and found them just like the rest of us. Oh, that's the truth of it, and I know it now. Our preachers are always calling upon the rich to do fine things for the poor, but the rich man is deaf as often as not, because some little puny thing in their own lives is dinning in their ears and will shut out all other sounds. I know that it must be so. The man who has millions doesn't think about humanity at all. He wages war upon trifles, his money-books are his library, he has blinded himself by reading them and lost his outlook upon the world. I thought it would all be so different, and then somebody touches me upon the shoulder and I look up and see that my vision is no vision at all, and that the true heart of it is my own all the time. Can you understand that, Lois, is it hidden from you also?"