ust rising.

It was Edmee. On recognising her I was about to move away, but she
passed her beautiful arm between the mullions, and held me back by the
collar of my jacket, saying:

"Why are you crying, Bernard?"

I yielded to her gentle violence, half ashamed at having betrayed my
weakness, and half enchanted at finding that Edmee was not unmoved by
it.

"What are you grieved at?" she continued. "What can draw such bitter
tears from you?"

"You despise me; you hate me; and you ask why I am in pain, why I am
angry!"

"It is anger, then, that makes you weep?" she said, drawing back her
arm.

"Yes; anger or something else," I replied.

"But what else?" she asked.

"I can't say; probably grief, as you suggest. The truth is my life here
is unbearable; my heart is breaking. I must leave you, Edmee, and go and
live in the middle of the woods. I cannot stay here any longer."

"Why is life unbearable? Explain yourself, Bernard. Now is our
opportunity for an explanation."

"Yes, with a wall between us. I can understand that you are not afraid
of me now."

"And yet it seems to me that I am only showing an interest in you; and
was I not as affectionate an hour ago when there was no wall between
us?"

"I begin to see why you are fearless, Edmee; you always find some means
of avoiding people, or of winning them over with pretty words. Ah, they
were right when they told me that all women are false, and that I must
love none of them."

"And who told you that? Your Uncle John, I suppose, or your Uncle
Walter; or was it your grandfather, Tristan?"

"You can jeer--jeer at me as much as you like. It is not my fault that
I was brought up by them. There were times, however, when they spoke the
truth."

"Bernard, would you like me to tell you why they thought women false?"

"Yes, tell me."

"Because they were brutes and tyrants to creatures weaker than
themselves. Whenever one makes one's self feared one runs the risk of
being deceived. In your childhood, when John used to beat you, did you
never try to escape his brutal punishment by disguising your little
faults?"

"I did; that was my only resource."

"You can understand, then, that deception is, if not the right, at least
the resource of the oppressed."

"I understand that I love you, and in that at any rate there can be no
excuse for your deceiving me."

"And who says that I have deceived you?"

"But you have; you said you loved me; you did not love me."