"Then I beg your pardon," he said with evident relief. "I have wronged you. Now I will literally and gratefully, if you will permit the word, throw myself on your mercy. You see what my home is, and my family I have children. You have been given some idea of what they think of me, and what I am in the main; an attentive husband and father, doing his utmost for the comfort of his home. You happen to have seen me under damning conditions, and without understanding the—the temptations. And now you have it in your power to ruin this home and blast the future of young and trusting lives; as well as break a woman's heart! Or, you have it in your power to save us all! You are a merciful woman, a philanthropist, my wife tells me, I believe you will save us. You see I am not asking justice, but pleading for mercy." He had not moved her by a hair's breadth unless it were to increase her indignation. Her voice was steady and cold. "Did you not have it in your power to ruin two homes, one of them widowed and fatherless, and did you spare them? You dare to talk to me of 'mercy' and 'philanthropy' when you were not willing to shelter even your own fireside!" He dropped his eyes from her face and worked nervously with the paper cutter he held. "You do not understand," he said. "It will be difficult to make you understand! You are one who makes no allowance for a man's temptations." She flashed a look of scorn at him, but he did not look at her, and went on more quickly. "I don't know what devil possessed me to do as I did that night. I did not plan it, deliberately. I did not plan any of it, it just happened. A fellow, whom we called 'the parson' in college, because he always took those parts in the plays, had just written me about a mock wedding at which he had officiated, and he was within easy reach. The truth is the girl tempted me!" He caught the flash in her eyes just then, and heard and understood her words: "Oh, of course; 'The woman beguiled me'!" He pulled himself together. "I simply mean that she was—was—very bewildering, and I—" He was finding it hard to explain. He wished that the woman would look at the floor; or at something, instead of at him! "I am going to be entirely frank with you," he said at last, with a sudden assumption of friendliness. "My wife is—we are—not congenial, not well mated; our marriage was a sort of mockery, from the first, one of convenience, one may say, on my part. I thought I ought to marry her because she cared for me, and because well, for family reasons. I never really loved with my whole soul any woman until I met Daisy; after I knew her, what seemed really wrong to me, was to continue the travesty of home life when I knew that home, to me, meant her. I intended, I fully intended, as soon as the necessary preliminaries could be managed to set myself free, in order to possess her.