old you all."

"You did."

"It would have been impossible that I should have asked you to be
mine without telling you the whole story." She could not answer him.
She knew it to be true,--that he had told her and must have told her.
But for herself it had been so improbable that he had not known of
her engagement! And then there had been no opportunity,--no fitting
opportunity. She knew that she had been wrong, foolish, ill-judging;
but there had been nothing of that premeditated secrecy,--that
secrecy with a cause, of which he had hinted that she was guilty.
"I suppose that I may take it as proved that I have been altogether
mistaken?" This he said in the severest tone which he knew how to
assume.

"How mistaken?"

"I have believed you to be sweet, and pure, and innocent, and
true;--one in whom my spirit might refresh itself as a man bathes his
heated limbs in the cool water. You were to have been to me the joy
of my life,--my great treasure kept at home, open to no eyes but my
own; a thing perfect in beauty, to think of when absent and to be
conscious of when present, without even the need of expression. 'Let
the wind come and the storm,' I said to myself, 'I cannot be unhappy,
because my wife is my own.' There is an external grace about you
which was to my thinking only the culture of the woman within."

"Well;--well."

"It was a dream. I had better have married that little girl. She was
silly, and soon loved some one better. But she did not deceive me."

"And I,--have I deceived you?"

He paused before he answered her, and then spoke as though with much
thought, "Yes," he said; "yes."

"Where? How?"

"I do not know. I cannot pretend even to guess. I shall probably
never know. I shall not strive to know. But I do know that you have
deceived me. There has been, nay, there is, a secret between you and
one whom I regard as among the basest of men, of which I have been
kept purposely in ignorance."

"There is no such secret."

"You were engaged to be his wife. That at any rate has been kept
from me. He has been here as your friend, and when he came,--into
my house,--the purport of his visit was kept from me. He asked for
something, which was refused, and consequently he has written to me.
For what did he ask?"

"Ask! For nothing! What was there for him to ask?"

"I do not know. I cannot even pretend to guess. As I read his letter
there must have been something. But it does not matter. While you
have s