She did not finish her sentence, or he did not hear the close in the miserable absence into which he lapsed. "Celia," he asked at last, "do you think she--she had any feeling about him?" "Oh," cried his wife restively, "how should _I_ know?" "I didn't suppose you _knew_," he pleaded. "I asked if you thought so." "What would be the use of thinking anything about it? The matter can't be helped now. If you inferred from anything she said to you--" "She told me repeatedly, in answer to questions as explicit as I could make them, that she wished him dismissed." "Well, then, very likely she did." "Very likely, Celia?" "Yes. At any rate, it's too late now." "Yes, it's too late now." He was silent again, and he began to walk the floor, after his old habit, without speaking. He was always mute when he was in pain, and he startled her with the anguish in which he now broke forth. "I give it up! I give it up! Celia, Celia, I'm afraid I did wrong! Yes, I'm afraid that I spoiled two lives. I ventured to lay my sacrilegious hands upon two hearts that a divine force was drawing together, and put them asunder. It was a lamentable blunder,--it was a crime!" "Why, Owen, how strangely you talk! How could you have done any differently under the circumstances?" "Oh, I could have done very differently. I might have seen him, and talked with him brotherly, face to face. He was a fearless and generous soul! And I was meanly scared for my wretched little decorums, for my responsibility to her friends, and I gave him no chance." "We wouldn't let you give him any," interrupted his wife. "Don't try to deceive yourself, don't try to deceive _me_, Celia! I know well enough that you would have been glad to have me show mercy; and I would not even show him the poor grace of passing his offer in silence, if I must refuse it. I couldn't spare him even so much as that!" "We decided--we both decided--that it would be better to cut off all hope at once," urged his wife. "Ah, it was I who decided that--decided everything. Leave me to deal honestly with myself at last, Celia! I have tried long enough to believe that it was not I who did it!" The pent-up doubt of years, the long-silenced self-accusal, burst forth in his words. "Oh, I have suffered for it! I thought he must come back, somehow, as long as we stayed in Venice. When we left Peschiera without a glimpse of him--I wonder I outlived it. But even if I had seen him there, what use would it have been? Would I have tried to repair the wrong done? What did I do but impute unmanly and impudent motives to him when he seized his chance to see her once more at that masquerade--" "No, no, Owen! He was not the one. Lily was satisfied of that long ago. It was nothing but a chance, a coincidence. Perhaps it was some one he had told about the affair--"