d. I know that you are
asking how I dared to draw you on to such a friendship as ours has been
through an acted lie, and how I have dared at last to tell the truth I
have postponed so long. You have a right to be wounded; you have a
right to be angry. You will do yourself the merest justice if you teach
yourself to despise and hate me; and if you tell me to go away at once
and darken your life no further, I will do it But let me say just this
one thing: whatever my cowardly silence may seem to prove, I have never
had a thought of you that has not been full of the profoundest respect
and reverence. You know now the truth about me, and you know that in
spite of it I have made love to you for months past. I can't tell what
a high-minded and pure-hearted woman may feel in such a case. I can't
guess if such a woman could find it in her nature to accept the lifelong
worship and affection of a man who is circumstanced as I am, if she
could find the courage and self-sacrifice to join her destinies with a
broken life like mine. Oh, if it were possible!' he cried, 'and oh, if
it were possible that I could nourish such a hope in fancy, and not know
in my inmost heart that only a scoundrel could be guilty of it! There,
Madge, it is all said now. It had to be said, but I shall never forgive
myself for having said it.'

The accusations he brought against himself were just as real as the
passion and despair which urged him on.

The Solitary, in his smoke-clouded mountain eyrie, surveyed all this, as
he had surveyed the varied experiences of life which had passed before
it in clear vision through his mind, and still the passion and despair
and the self-accusing, self-excusing thoughts were as real to him as
they had been at the moment he recalled. He accepted that reality as a
proof, scarcely needed, of the already established shallowness of his
own nature--a brawling stream always ready to rave round any little
impediment in its path; a mere miniature of the torrent, with no
resolute strength or purpose in it, but full of a fussy vivacity and
self-importance which he could most heartily and bitterly despise.
All his life long the same futile story repeated: the same headlong
impetuosity, the same want of steadfast force, the same absence of
control. And yet, even in the depth of self-reproach, he could not deny
to himself some hint of purpose which had an honest meaning in his mind,
and, looking back, he saw that he had found an entr