nd-by, to our bitter cost.

I cannot tell to this day how it came about, or what first led me to
suspect how things were going with us both; but long before the waning of
that autumn a coldness had sprung up between my friend and myself. It
was nothing that could have been put into words. It was nothing that
either of us could have explained or justified, to save his life. We
lodged together, ate together, worked together, exactly as before; we
even took our long evening's walk together, when the day's labour was
ended; and except, perhaps, that we were more silent than of old, no mere
looker-on could have detected a shadow of change. Yet there it was,
silent and subtle, widening the gulf between us every day.

It was not his fault. He was too true and gentle-hearted to have
willingly brought about such a state of things between us. Neither do I
believe--fiery as my nature is--that it was mine. It was all hers--hers
from first to last--the sin, and the shame, and the sorrow.

If she had shown a fair and open preference for either of us, no real
harm could have come of it. I would have put any constraint upon myself,
and, Heaven knows! have borne any suffering, to see Mat really happy. I
know that he would have done the same, and more if he could, for me. But
Gianetta cared not one sou for either. She never meant to choose between
us. It gratified her vanity to divide us; it amused her to play with us.
It would pass my power to tell how, by a thousand imperceptible shades of
coquetry--by the lingering of a glance, the substitution of a word, the
flitting of a smile--she contrived to turn our heads, and torture our
hearts, and lead us on to love her. She deceived us both. She buoyed us
both up with hope; she maddened us with jealousy; she crushed us with
despair. For my part, when I seemed to wake to a sudden sense of the
ruin that was about our path and I saw how the truest friendship that
ever bound two lives together was drifting on to wreck and ruin, I asked
myself whether any woman in the world was worth what Mat had been to me
and I to him. But this was not often. I was readier to shut my eyes
upon the truth than to face it; and so lived on, wilfully, in a dream.

Thus the autumn passed away, and winter came--the strange, treacherous,
Genoese winter, green with olive and ilex, brilliant with sunshine, and
bitter with storm. Still, rivals at heart and friends on the surface,
Mat and I lingered on