It is evening of the same day--a dark sullen December evening, dark as the thoughts that throng my breast. I feel unsympathetic, cold, almost dead. Much as I have tried during the past few hours, I cannot quite reconcile myself to the idea that it is I--I myself--who am principally concerned in all this horror that has taken place. I argue in my own mind. I represent the case a for a third person. I cannot realize that the one most to be pitied is I--Phyllis Phyllis _what?_ I have at length consented to see Marmaduke, and am lying upon a sofa in a hopelessly dishevelled state, as he enters. I have not shed a single tear; yet the black hollows beneath my eyes might have come from ceaseless weeping. I half rise as he comes across the room, yet cannot raise my head to meet his gaze. I dread the havoc despair and self torture will have wrought in his face. He moves slowly, lingeringly, until he reaches the hearthrug, and there stands and regard me imploringly. This I feel and know, though through some other sense beside sight. "Will you not even look at me?" he says, presently in a change, almost agonized, tone. I force my eyes to meet his, but drop them again almost immediately. "Is forgiveness quite out of the question?" "No," I return; "of course I forgive you. It was not your fault. There is nothing to forgive. But in the first instance you deceive me; that I feel the hardest. Even to myself my voice sounds cold and strange. "I acknowledge it. But how was I to tell this would be the end of it? It appeared impossible you should ever know the truth. It was only known to myself and one other.---" "And that was---" "Mark Gore. The woman, as I believed, was dead, and who could betray the secret? The whole miserable story was so hateful to me that to repeat it to you--whom I so devotedly loved--was more than I had courage for. How could I tell you such a sickening tale! How could I watch the changes--the dislike, it might be--that would cloud your face as I related it? By your own confession, I knew you bore me none of that love that would have helped me safely through even a worse revelation, and I dreaded lest the bare liking you entertained for me should have an end, and that you, a young girl, would shrink from a widower, and the hero of such a story." "Still, it would have been better if you had spoken; I can forgive anything but deceit." "Once or twice I tried to tell you the only secret I had from you, but you would not listen, or else at the moment spoke such words as made me doubt the expediency of ever mentioning the affair at all. But now that it is too late, I regret my duplicity, or cowardice, or whatever it was that swayed me." "Too late, indeed!" I repeat almost mechanically. After a minute or two, he says, in a low voice:--- "Have you no interest, no curiosity, that you do not ask? Will you let me tell you now all the real circumstances of the case?"