"A thousand curses!" he cried; "a thousand curses on their heads who have brought us all to this! It is not to be borne! It is a tangle of fiends. Great God! To be loved by the two best women on earth, and then, instead of happiness, to find it end in misery all round! It is the work of devils! It is not to be borne!" He remembered me at his side, and fought down his wrath. At last he turned to me an ashen face, and began: "There is much to say. Where will you sit down?" "Nowhere," I answered. "No, do not touch me again. What there is to be said ... say." We stood an arm’s-length apart on the stones, and he spoke: "Gertrude Langley," he said, "for five weeks I have loved you, and there is no woman in the world, save you, that I ever did love or ever shall. But, through a string of ghastly blunders hardly to be explained or even believed, I have loved you under another name, and amid wildly false notions of your station. Be hurt at nothing I shall say. I believed, on twofold testimony, that you were Susan, your maid. Do not be galled or insulted till you have heard me out." "You cannot insult me," I said. "Besides, I know all." "No!" he cried, "you do not know. You know that I have written Susan letters, that I have badgered her to marry me, that I have followed her to Sainte Véronique, and that I am to set eyes upon her to-morrow. But, listen. I will tell you what you do not know. You don’t know that this poor girl has a heart of gold, a soul of fire, a mind that is a fountain of gems. Did you know that?" "No," I said, "I did not." He mistook my ghost of a smile. It stung him. "Miss Langley," he said, "we have been wrong; you, and I, and all who have been born, like you and me, to rank and wealth and leisure. Because the novels are nearly all written round such lives as ours, we think that the poor and the servile are without romance, without spirituality. We are not quite sure that they have minds and hearts and souls of their own. I say, we have been wrong. All Susan’s few letters to me, save one, have been shy and hurried. But--though I say it in the ears of the only woman I can ever love--there isn’t, there can’t be in all the world, a nobler mind than this poor Susan’s, a sweeter heart, a purer soul." I did not answer. His calmness left him. "You don’t see, you won’t see, you can’t see!" he cried. "Why will you make me put it into words? You are shutting your eyes to the tragedy of it all. Gertrude Langley, what would you have me do?" I was given some dim sense of the greatness of his soul. Almost mechanically, I replied: "I would have you do only what is right."