"There's no help for it!" he said, at last. "It must come out. Once in my life I did something that humiliated me in my own eyes. I committed a sin against my own sense of honor--a base act, for which I never can forgive myself, although a court of honor in matters of gallantry--chosen from among my own equals, mind you--would probably have let me off with a slight penance, if not scot-free altogether. You know what I think of what is called sin; there is no _absolute_ moral code; what brands one forever is only a little spot upon another--all according to the delicacy and sensitiveness of the skin. Even conscience is a product of culture, and the categorical imperative is a pure fiction. What a brutal blackguard of a soldier permits himself in plundering a captured town, and feels his conscience untroubled, would dishonor his officer to all eternity. But I am not going to theorize; suffice it to say that that inner harmony with one's self, on which everything depends, was utterly destroyed in me by this act. From the way in which it haunted me, you can conceive how, in a moment of weakness, I confessed the whole story to Irene's uncle, little consolation as I could get from the absolution of so very odd a saint. I saw _how_ little, when he utterly failed to understand how I could take the matter so to heart, especially as it had taken place a considerable time before my engagement. I instantly repented most bitterly that I had confided in him; and his promise, never by a single syllable to recur to it, reassured me but little. "I was right. He forgot it himself; and one unhappy day he began, in the very presence of his niece--we had just been speaking of all manner of far more innocent adventures, and even these she would not let pass--he began to refer to that wretched story. Something must have come into my face that instantly gave my sweetheart an idea that this reference meant something beyond the common. Her uncle, too, began to stammer, and made a clumsy attempt to change the subject. That made the matter worse. Irene stopped talking, and soon after left the room. The uncle, good-natured as usual, cursed his own loquacity again and again; but, naturally, that did not help things. When I saw my little one again, she asked me to what his words referred. I was too proud to lie to her; I confessed that I carried about with me the memory of something that I wished to conceal from myself--how much more from her! With that she grew silent again. But on the evening of that day, when I was a second time alone with her, she told me that she must know the whole. I could not have done anything that she could not forgive me; but she felt that she could not live by my side when there was such a secret between us.