n
reproach that was almost anger.

"To me? Do you suppose I'm thinking of myself?"

"Perhaps not. That doesn't prevent my thinking of you. But I was
thinking of myself, too. Supposing I had done this thing that you
would have loathed; even though you had never known it, I should have
felt that I had betrayed your trust, that I had taken something from
you that I had no right to take, something that you would never have
given me if you had known. What was I to do?"

She did not answer him. Once before, he remembered, when his honour
was in difficulties, she had refused to help it out, left it to
struggle to the light; which was what it did now.

"It would have been better to have said nothing and done nothing."

He expected her to close instantly with that view of his behaviour
which honour had presented as the final one, but this she did not do.

"If you had said nothing you might have done what you liked."

"I see. It's my saying it that makes the difference?"

"That is _not_ what I meant. I meant that you were free to publish
what you have written. You are not free to say these things to me."

"For the life of me I don't know why I said them. It means perdition
for my poems and for me. I knew that was all I had to gain by telling
you the truth."

"But it _isn't_ the truth. You know it isn't. You don't even think it
is."

"And if it were, would it be so terrible to you to hear it?"

She did not answer. She only looked at him, as if by looking she could
read the truth. For his face had never lied.

He persisted. "If it were true, what would you think of me?"

"I should think it most dishonourable of you to say so. But it isn't
true."

He smiled. "Therefore it can't be dishonourable of me to say so."

"No, not that. You are not dishonourable; therefore it can't be true.
Let us forget that you ever said it."

"But I can't forget that it's true any more than I can make it untrue.
You think me dishonourable, because you think I've changed. But I
haven't changed. It always was so, ever since I knew you; and that's
more than five years ago now. I am dishonourable; but that's not where
the dishonour comes in. _The_ dishonourable thing would have been to
have left off caring for you. But I never did leave off. There never
was a minute when it wasn't true, nor a minute when I didn't think it.
If I was sure of nothing else I was always sure of that. Where the
dishonour came in was in caring for another woman,