What was to be done? De Vaux, according to the old scholastic term, had got himself between the horns of a dilemma; and we must pause for one moment, in order to inquire how far he was art and part in putting himself into that situation. It is wonderful, most wonderful, how people deceive themselves in this world, and how they go on arguing with themselves on both sides of the question for an hour together, affecting to be puzzled, and asking themselves what is to be done, when, from the very first, they have determined, in secret counsel, what to do; and all this logic and disquisition has solely been for the purpose of bewildering _reason_, or _duty_, or _conscience_, or any other of those personified qualities of the soul, which the great parliament of man's passions choose to look upon as _the public_, _the spectators_. Now, at that point of De Vaux's cogitations wherein he thought, and rejected the idea, of admitting Manners to his confidence in the matter before him, as is fully displayed three or four pages back, a fancy struck him, which instantly changed into a secret resolution, not to make Manners his confidant in the business, but to open his whole heart to Marian de Vaux; and although it needed scarcely any argument to prove that she, whose fate was the most strictly bound up with his own, whose affection he certainly possessed, and whose good sense he never doubted, was the person, of all others, in whom he ought to confide; yet, some idle cant that he had read in some foolish book, or heard from some foolish people, about the absurdity of trusting a woman; some silly sneer or insignificant jest, magnified into a bugbear through the mist of memory, had power enough to make him hide his own determination from himself; and, in the first instance, go the roundabout path we have traced, in order to prove that he had no other resource but to tell her the whole affair, ere he boldly admitted his resolution even to his own heart, and brought forward the true and upright motives on which it was founded. So weak is human nature!