"I feel as though I had done you a great wrong, Nora," he said. "I did you a wrong already in the beginning when I tried to force my love upon your inexperience—when I tried to bind you to me without having really won you. I failed, and I was justly punished. But I wronged you still more when I sought you out and offered you my friendship. I deceived you and I deceived myself. It was not friendship, and people were right to give it another name and to look askance at my part in your life. Nora, it is my one excuse that I did not know. I believed absolutely in my own loyalty, until that night of the ball. Then for the first time I knew that I was dangerous, and whether I had been recalled or not, I should have gone away. But Fate was too strong for me. If I had really been your friend, I should not have taken you with me that night. It was a mad thing to have done. But everything happened so quickly that I lost my self-control, my reason. Now I feel as though I had put an insurmountable barrier between you and your husband and had ruined your happiness—perhaps your life." She had listened to him in unbroken silence, her brows puckered into painful, ominous lines. "You say you are not my friend?" she said. "What are you, then?" "One who loves you," he answered, "and one who has never really ceased to long for you as his own." "And you talked of friendship!" she cried. "God forgive me. Nora, a man does not know his own heart until the moment comes when he is put to the test as I was. I believed it possible that I could care for you in that way. I should have known better." "I also should have known better," she said. "No; you were so young. You could not have known what a man is capable and incapable of performing. The blame is all mine. And if I have helped to bring sorrow into your life, my punishment will be more than I can bear." So much genuine grief and remorse revealed itself in his shaken voice that she laid her hand pityingly on his arm. "Don’t talk as though it were alone your fault," she said. "It was mine as well. If I could not have judged your heart, I could have judged my own." "Nora!" he exclaimed, horror-stricken. "I did not love you," she went on, almost to herself, "and I do not love you. I do not believe that I love any one on earth; but I always knew that I might grow to love you. And—perhaps I have something of my father in me—I should not have run so great a risk." "Nora!" he repeated, and beneath the horror there rang a painful joy. She stopped and looked him sternly in the face.