But state it to whom? There is one Addressee to whom I have not lifted up my eyes. I, proud and conquering whom among my fellow-worms, have found the lesser law press hard on me, but I have not straightway invoked the greater. Man's decrees I have found strong and wise and admirable; the other is too wonderful for me. And this is the conclusion I promised you. To man, man's law is of more consequence than God's. Perhaps the damned are not utterly damned, so long as they do not add presumptuousness to their error. To have appealed and to have had that appeal rejected _were_ damnation.... I do not appeal. Nor can I see that I state my case to man. Nay, for I confess man's authority, lest it should appear that I do not, I shall destroy these papers. To-night or to-morrow I shall destroy them. Man shall not say that I have shirked the human issue. I refuse to plead at all. Let any who take it upon themselves to accuse or defend me plead or charge what they will. I am mute. I burn this.... I am tired.... And yet one boon I do crave. Perhaps those standards of mine, by their very lowness, may be the evidence, not of a smaller, but of a larger conception of Him Who Reigneth than might at first glance appear.... I am tired.... But all this advances me little with my resolution. Indeed, a fresh glare has just broken in on my brain. I was looking back a few moments ago on that long chain of circumstances with which my darling has been torturing herself--that old slander, innocencies between Louie and myself possible to have been misconstrued, my coming upon her that night in Billy's top room, Evie's own temperamental bias against Louie's profession, her silences, her belief of the calumny. Had Miriam Levey but known of my visit to the Models' Club and that strange walk of ours on the night of the Berkeley dinner, her case had indeed been complete! I had been reviewing all this, I say; and suddenly it struck me, suppose I do tell her? _What then?_... Do you see--as the terrible Louie had seen--what then? I am supposing that the revelation did not kill her; do you see what then? At last I saw it, and groaned. What then? Why, what but that I had put another before herself? What but that, while she had shared my board and bed, that fatal burden of my honour and confidence and trust had gone to another? What but that Louie, after all, _had_ had the key and password of my life that I had denied to herself? What could I answer did she live to say, "What, you married me without telling me this? You tell me _now_, after having concealed it until concealment is no longer possible? You give me, _now_, something she's had the use of and has passed on to me? What is she to you, then, that _I_ am not? Where do I fall short as a wife that _I_ couldn't have borne this for my husband or died trying to bear it? Take it. Give it to her. She can have it. Fool, that I couldn't see this for myself, but must have Miriam Levey to point it out to me!"