have to go through what I did. But I've come
out of it. You've been pretty hard on me with your infernal virtue; but
if you think you can make me suffer more, you can't. I'm past it."

I said I was sorry if I seemed too hard on him. But it would be well if
he tried to look at his really very outrageous behaviour as it was bound
to appear to other people.

"You admit, then," he said, "that it appears more outrageous than it is?"

I said, "You see, my dear fellow, I don't yet know what it is."

He asked me if I'd like to know what it was? And I told him that,
certainly, some sort of an account was owing and that he'd better perhaps
make a clean breast of it while he was about it.

Well--he made his clean breast.

He confessed that the sting of a great deal that I had said to him was in
its truth. I needn't be frightened. Nothing had happened. Nothing beyond
what I knew. But--there was a point, he said, when everything might have.
When he had meant that it should happen.

He hadn't meant it at first. Nothing had been further from him when he
let her come to Bruges. He had meant nothing--nothing beyond looking at
the Belfry. He had thought--as she did--that it would be quite possible
to be content with looking at the Belfry. That was where the damned folly
of the thing had come in. They began to be aware of the folly when they
found themselves going together to Antwerp. He wasn't aware even then of
what he meant. But he knew what he meant when he left Antwerp and took
her to Ghent.

Because he _did_ take her there. He meant--_then_--exactly what Viola's
father and her brother and her uncles and her male cousins would mean if
they took a woman to Ghent.

"I meant," he said, "to compromise her. But--here's where you went
wrong--I didn't mean to compromise her in order to marry her. I didn't
mean to marry her at all. There was a moment when I thought that marrying
me--tying herself up to me for ever--was a risk I ought not to let her
take. I thought--I thought I could make her happy without all that awful
risk. It seemed to me that after the risk we _had_ taken we had a right
to happiness. Certainly _she_ had. And I thought she thought the same.

"So I took her to Ghent.

"I say I thought she knew what I meant when I took her.

"I ought to tell you that we _did_ have rooms in the same hotel in
Antwerp and Ghent. There weren't any English there that mattered--nobody
that either of us knew.

"But when I'd got her