.

"You have done me a great wrong--you have done me a cruel wrong! I have
been telling it to Miss Vivian; I came on purpose to tell her. I can't
really tell her; I can't tell her the details; it 's too painful! But
you know what I mean! I could n't stand it any longer. I thought of
going away--but I could n't do that. I must come and say what I feel. I
can't bear it now."

This outbreak of a passionate sense of injury in a man habitually so
undemonstrative, so little disposed to call attention to himself, had in
it something at once of the touching and the terrible. Bernard, for an
instant, felt almost bewildered; he asked himself whether he had not,
after all, been a monster of duplicity. He was guilty of the weakness
of taking refuge in what is called, I believe, in legal phrase, a
side-issue.

"Don't say all this before Angela!" he exclaimed, with a kind of
artificial energy. "You know she is not in the least at fault, and that
it can only give her pain. The thing is between ourselves."

Angela was sitting there, looking up at both the men. "I like to hear
it," she said.

"You have a singular taste!" Bernard declared.

"I know it 's between ourselves," cried Gordon, "and that Miss Vivian is
not at fault. She is only too lovely, too wise, too good! It is you
and I that are at fault--horribly at fault! You see I admit it, and you
don't. I never dreamed that I should live to say such things as this
to you; but I never dreamed you would do what you have done! It 's
horrible, most horrible, that such a difference as this should come
between two men who believed themselves--or whom I believed, at
least--the best friends in the world. For it is a difference--it 's a
great gulf, and nothing will ever fill it up. I must say so; I can't
help it. You know I don't express myself easily; so, if I break out this
way, you may know what I feel. I know it is a pain to Miss Vivian, and
I beg her to forgive me. She has so much to forgive that she can forgive
that, too. I can't pretend to accept it; I can't sit down and let it
pass. And then, it is n't only my feelings; it 's the right; it 's the
justice. I must say to her that you have no right to marry her; and beg
of her to listen to me and let you go."

"My dear Gordon, are you crazy?" Bernard demanded, with an energy which,
this time at least, was sufficiently real.

"Very likely I am crazy. I am crazy with disappointment and the
bitterness of what I have lost. Add to th