neself!
Two years ago come August Elspeth Barrow and I agreed to part--"

"Oh, 'agreed'--"

"Have it so! I said that we must part. She acquiesced--and that
without the appeals that the stage and literature show us. Oh,
doubtless I might have seen a pierced spirit, and did not, and was
brute beast there! But one thing you have got to believe, and that is
that neither of us knew what was to happen. Even with that, she was
aware of how a letter might be sent, with good hope of reaching me.
She was not a weak, ignorant girl.... I went away, and within a
fortnight was deep in that long attempt that ends here. I became
actively an agent for the Prince and his father. A hundred names and
their fates were in my hands. You can fill in the multitude of
activities, each seeming small in itself, but the whole preoccupying
every field.... If Elspeth Barrow wrote I never received her letter.
When my thought turned in that direction, it saw her well and not
necessarily unhappy. Time passed. For reasons, I ceased to write home,
and again for reasons I obliterated paths by which I might be reached.
For months I heard nothing, as I said nothing. I was on the very eve
of quitting Paris, under careful disguise, to go into Scotland. Came
suddenly your challenge--and still, though I knew that to you at least
our relations must have been discovered, I knew no more than that! I
did not know that she was dead.... I could not stay to fight you then.
I left you to brand me as you pleased in your mind."

"I had already branded you."

"Later, I saw that you had. Perhaps then I did not wonder. In
September--almost a year from that Christmas Eve--I yet did not know.
Then, in Edinburgh, I came upon Mr. Wotherspoon. He told me.... I had
no wicked intent toward Elspeth Barrow--none according to my canon,
which has been that of the natural man. We met by accident. We loved
at once and deeply. She had in her an elf queen! But at last the human
must have darkened and beset her. Had I known of those fears, those
dangers, I might have turned homeward from France and every shining
scheme...."

"Ah no, you would not--"

"... If I would not, then certainly I should have written to Jarvis
Barrow and to others, acknowledging my part--"

"Perhaps you would have done that. Perhaps not. You might have found
reasons of obligation for not doing so. 'Loved deeply'! You never
loved her deeply! You have loved nothing deeply save yourself!"

"Perhaps. Yet I thi