"How often had I not heard you bitter and contemptuous towards people because _they_ are treacherous, cruel! How often have you talked of _your_ love of nature, of _our_ inhumanity towards lower creatures! But what have _you_ done? "You set your fancy upon one of these creatures, lie in wait for it, beset it with kindness, persevere in overcoming its wildness. You are amused, delighted, proud of your success. One day--you remember?--it sang as you had always wished to hear it. It annoyed you, and you threw a stone at it. With a little less angry aim you would have killed it. I have never seen anything more inhuman. How do I know that some day you would not be tired of me, and throw a stone at _me_? When a woman submits to this once, she will have them thrown at her whenever she sings at the wrong time, and she will never know when the right time is. "Then you thought you were asked to sacrifice it, and now you have done that. How do I know that some day you might not be tempted to sacrifice me?" She paused, her voice breaking, and remained silent, as if unable to get beyond that thought. "If you have finished," I said, very quietly, "I have something to say to you, and we need not meet after this. "I trapped the _bird_; you trapped _me_. I understood you to ask something of me, to cast me off when I refused it. Such was my faith in you that beneath your words I did not look for a snare. How hard it was for me to forgive you what you asked is my own affair now; but forgive you I did. How hard it was to grant it, that also is now, and will always be, my own secret. I beg you merely to believe this: knowing it to be all that you have described--and far more than you can ever understand--still, I did it. Had you demanded of me something worse, I should have granted that. If you think a man will not do wrong for a woman, you are mistaken. If you think men always love the wrong that they do for the women whom they love, you are mistaken again. "You have held up my faults to me. I knew them before. I have not loved them. Do not think that I am trying to make a virtue out of anything I say; but in all my thoughts of you there has been no fault of yours that I have not hidden from my sight, and have not resolved as best I could never to see. Yet do not dream that I have found you faultless. "You fear I might sacrifice you to something else. It is possible. Every man resists temptation only to a certain point; every man has his price. It is a risk you will run with any. "If you doubt that a man is capable of sacrificing one thing that he loves to another that he loves more, tempt him, lie in wait for his weakness, ensnare him in the toils of his greater passion, and learn the truth. "I make no defence--believe all that you say. But had you loved me, I might have been all this, and it would have been nothing." With this I walked slowly out of the arbor, but Georgiana stood beside me. Her light touch was on my arm.