"I know what you mean," she answered, indignantly; "but you are quite wrong; he does care for me. And if I give up my position in society for his sake, he is worth it, and I am content. And it is my own doing, too. I know that there cannot be one law for me and another for all the other women in the world, and if I break through a social convention I am prepared to abide by the consequences. Do you want to make me believe that his sympathy was pretended, that he deliberately planned-- something I have no word to express--and would have carried out his plan absolutely in cold blood, without a spark of affection for me? It would be hard to believe it of any man; it is impossible to believe it of him. He is a man of strong passions, if you will, but of noble purpose; and if I make a sacrifice for him, he will be making one for me also. He may have been betrayed at times by grief, or other mental pain, which weakened his moral nature for the moment, and left him at the mercy of bad impulses; but I can believe such impulses were isolated, and any action they led him into was bitterly repented of; and no one will ever make me alter my conviction that I wronged him when I doubted him, even for a moment." "This is all very well, Ideala," I said, trying not to irritate her by direct opposition, "if you appeared to him as you appear to me. Do you think you did? Was there anything in your conduct that might have given him a low estimate of your character to begin with? Anything that might have led him to doubt your honesty, and think, when you made your confession, that you were trying to get up a little play in which you intended him to take a leading part? That you merely wished to ease your mind from some inevitable sense of shame in wrong-doing by finding an excuse for yourself to begin with--an excuse by which you would excite his interest and sympathy, and save yourself from his contempt?" "Oh!" she exclaimed, "could he--could any one--think such a thing possible?" "Such things are being done every day, Ideala, and a man of the world would naturally be on his guard against deception. If he thought he was being deceived, do you think it likely he would feel bound to be scrupulous?" "But he _did_ believe in me," she declared, passionately. "He pretended to; it was part of the play. You see he only kept it up until he thoroughly understood you, and then his real feelings appeared, and he was rude to you. For I call his absence on that occasion distinctly rude, and intentionally so too, since he sent no apology." "He was only rude to me to save me from myself, then, as Lancelot was rude to Elaine," she answered. "Or is it not just possible that he was disappointed when he found you better than he had supposed? that he felt he had wasted his time for nothing, and was irritated----"