ow."

"And what will that answer be?"

"It is for you to tell me," said Boyce.

"In order to undertake such a terrible responsibility," said I, "I must
know the whole truth concerning Althea Fenimore."

"I've come here to tell it to you," said he.

CHAPTER XXIII

It was to a priest rather than to a man that he made full confession of
his grievous sin. He did not attempt to mitigate it or to throw upon
another a share of the blame. From that attitude he did not vary a
hair's breadth. Mea culpa; mea maxima culpa. That was the burthen of
his avowal.

I, knowing the strange mingling in his nature of brutality and
sensitiveness, of animal and spiritual, and knowing something of the
unstable character of Althea Fenimore, may more justly, I think, than
he, sketch out the miserable prologue of the drama. That she was madly,
recklessly in love with him there can be no doubt. Nor can there be
doubt that unconsciously she fired the passion in him. The deliberate,
cold-blooded seducer of his friend's daughter, such as Boyce, in his
confession, made himself out to be, is a rare phenomenon. Almost
invariably it is the woman who tempts--tempts innocently and
unknowingly, without intent to allure, still less with thought of
wrong--but tempts all the same by the attraction which she cannot
conceal, by the soft promise which she cannot keep out of her eyes.

That was the beginning of it. Betty, whom he loved, and to whom he was
engaged, was away from Wellingsford. In those days she was very much
the young Diana, walking in search of chaste adventures, quite
contented with the love that lay serenely warm in her heart and
thinking little of a passionate man's needs--perhaps starting away from
too violent an expression of them--perhaps prohibiting them altogether.
The psychology of the pre-war young girl absorbed, even though
intellectually and for curiosity's sake, in the feminist movement, is
yet to be studied. Betty, then, was away. Althea, beata possidens, made
her artless, innocent appeal for victory. Unconsciously she tempted.
The man yielded. A touch of the lips in a moment of folly, the man
blazed, the woman helpless was consumed. This happened in January, just
before Althea's supposed visit to Scotland. Boyce was due at a Country
House party near Carlisle. In the first flush of their madness they
agreed upon the wretched plan. She took rooms in the town and he
visited her there. Whether he or she conceived it, I d