"And you thought it proper that I should be kept in the dark!" She remained silent. She could not apologise to him after hearing the accusation which rankled in his bosom. She could not go about to explain that the moment fittest for an explanation had never come. She could not endeavour even to make him understand that because her story was so like his own, hers had not been told. She knew the comparative insignificance of her own fault, and yet circumstances had brought it about that she must stand oppressed with this weight of guilt in his eyes. As he should be just or unjust, or rather merciful or unmerciful, so must she endure or be unable to endure her doom. "I do not understand it," he said, with affected calm. "It is the case, then, that you have brought me into this position with premeditated falsehood, and have wilfully deceived me as to your previous engagement?" "No!" "How then?" "There has been no wilful deceit,--no cause for deceit whatsoever. You were engaged to marry the lady who is now Mrs. Geraldine. I was engaged to marry Sir Francis." "But I told you all." "You did." "It would have been impossible that I should have asked you to be mine without telling you the whole story." She could not answer him. She knew it to be true,--that he had told her and must have told her. But for herself it had been so improbable that he had not known of her engagement! And then there had been no opportunity,--no fitting opportunity. She knew that she had been wrong, foolish, ill-judging; but there had been nothing of that premeditated secrecy,--that secrecy with a cause, of which he had hinted that she was guilty. "I suppose that I may take it as proved that I have been altogether mistaken?" This he said in the severest tone which he knew how to assume. "How mistaken?" "I have believed you to be sweet, and pure, and innocent, and true;--one in whom my spirit might refresh itself as a man bathes his heated limbs in the cool water. You were to have been to me the joy of my life,--my great treasure kept at home, open to no eyes but my own; a thing perfect in beauty, to think of when absent and to be conscious of when present, without even the need of expression. 'Let the wind come and the storm,' I said to myself, 'I cannot be unhappy, because my wife is my own.' There is an external grace about you which was to my thinking only the culture of the woman within." "Well;--well." "It was a dream. I had better have married that little girl. She was silly, and soon loved some one better. But she did not deceive me." "And I,--have I deceived you?" He paused before he answered her, and then spoke as though with much thought, "Yes," he said; "yes." "Where? How?"