"But what am I saying?" lapsing out of his quotation into broken-hearted prose again. "It was not she! If I thought it were she, could I live a moment? It is her mother; no sane person can doubt that it is her mother's doing! She was always so sweetly docile, and her mother has conceived some prejudice against me. Did not I tell you how barbarously she shut the door upon me last night?--shut the door of my heaven in my face just as I thought I had won the right to enter it. Who would not have thought that it was won who had seen us together in the wood?" Jim writhes. "Oh, never mind the wood now!" "Someone has prejudiced her against me, but who? I did not know that I had an enemy in the world. Someone has told her about--about Oxford--about my being sent down." Jim is silent. "If it is only that----" a tearful buoyancy beginning to pierce through his despair. "It is not that." "Someone has put a spoke in my wheel; but who? You are the only person who could, and you, dear old chap, are the last person who would, though you were not very encouraging to me last night! _You_ did not?" There is so direct an interrogation in the last words, accompanied by so confiding a look of affection, that yet has an uneasy touch of doubt in it, that Jim is obliged to answer. "No, I did not put a spoke in your wheel; but"--his honesty forcing the admission--"I am not at all so sure that I am the last person who would have done so, if I could." Byng has wiped his eyes to clear his vision of the blinding tears, and has again directed them to the note, which he has all this while been alternately pressing against his heart, laying upon his forehead, and crushing against his mouth. "It seems blasphemy to say so of anything that came from her hand," he says, poring for the hundredth time over each obscure word, "but it reads like nonsense, does it not? '_I shall never marry you! I have no right to marry anyone!_' No right? what does she mean?" Jim shakes his head sadly. "How can I tell?" "Do you think it is possible"--lifting his disfigured eyes in horrified appeal to his friend--"it is a dreadful hypothesis, but I can think of no other--that that bright intelligence was clouded--that--that her dear little wits were touched when she wrote this?" "No, I do not think so." "You--you are not keeping anything from me?"--coming a step nearer, and convulsively clutching his friend's arm--"you--you do not know anything--anything that could throw light upon--upon this? I do not know whether you are conscious of it, but there is something in your manner that might lead me to that conclusion. Do you know--have you heard anything?" "I know nothing," replies Jim slowly, and looking uncomfortably away from the questioner, "but I conjecture, I fear, I believe that--that----" "That what? For God's sake, be a little quicker!" "That--that--there is a--a--something in her past." Byng falls back a pace or two, and puts up his hand to his head.