"I do not know what I am to forgive," she says, half bewildered. "You were not accountable for your actions. You were too ill to know what you were doing." "Oh, you think I am alluding to that last time," cries he, precipitately correcting her. "No, no; you are right. I was not accountable then. You might as well have reasoned with a wild beast out of a menagerie. I was a perfect Bedlamite then. No"--going on very rapidly, as it in desperate anxiety to make her comprehend with the least possible delay--"what I am asking you--asking you on my knees--to forgive me for, is my whole conduct to you from the beginning." The two white faces are looking breathlessly into each other, and though of late he has been tussling with death on a bed, and she has been walking about, and plying her embroidery, and dining at a public table, hers is far the whiter of the two. It must be the unwonted exertion of talking so much that makes him bring out his next speech in jerks and gasps. "I forced my acquaintance upon you at the very beginning; I watched you like a detective; I beset you wherever you went; I pestered you with my visits. Jim always told me that it was not the conduct of a gentleman, but I would not believe him--not even when"--how difficult it is! he finds it almost as hard work as his mother had done upon the Mole--"not even when, by my importunities, I had driven you away--obliged you to rush away almost by night from a place you liked--a place you were happy in--to escape me. And I have no excuse to offer you--none; unless, indeed, as I sometimes think, my mind was off its balance even then. I express myself wretchedly!"--in a tone of deep distress--"but you will overlook that, will not you? You will--will understand what I mean?" She makes an assenting motion with her head. At this moment she cannot speak: she will be able to do so again directly, but she must have just a minute or two. Yet she must not leave him for an instant in doubt that she understands him. Oh yes, she understands him--understands that he is apologizing for having ever loved her; that he is awkwardly trying to draw the mantle of insanity over even the Vallombrosan wood. It is true that he does it with every sign of discomfort and pain; and he looks away from her, as Mrs. Byng, too, had found it pleasanter to do. "Do you remember what Schiller said when he was dying? 'Many things are growing clearer to me.' I thought a good deal of those words as I lay over there"--glancing towards the now neatly-arranged and empty bed. "One night they thought it was all up with me--I heard them say so. They did not think I was conscious, but I was; and it did strike me that I had made a poor thing of it, and that if ever I was given the chance I would make a new start."