"Bernal--it's all because I am too good-hearted, too unsuspecting. Being slow to think evil of others, I foolishly assume that others will be equally charitable. And you don't know what women are--you don't know how the sentimental ones impose upon a man in my office. I give you my word of honour as a man--my word of _honour_, mind you!--there never has been a thing between us but the purest, the most elevated--the loftiest, most ideal--" "Hold on, old chap--I shall have to take the car ahead, you know, if you won't let me on this one...." "--as pure a woman as God ever made, while as for myself, I think my integrity of purpose and honesty of character, my sense of loyalty should be sufficiently known--" "Say, old boy--" Bernal's face had lighted with a sudden flash of insight--"is it--I don't wish to be indiscreet--but is it anything about Mrs. Wyeth?" "Then you _do_ know?" "Nothing, except that Nance met me at the door just now and puzzled me a bit by her very curious manner of asking if I had been at the Wyeth's this afternoon." "_What_?" The other turned upon him, his eyes again blazing with the yellow points, his whole figure alert. "She asked you _that--Really_?" "To be sure!" "And you said--" "'No'--of course--and she mumbled something about having been foolish to think I could have been. You know, old man, Nance was troubled. I could see that." His brother was now pacing the floor, his head bent from the beautifully squared shoulders, his face the face of a mind working busily. "An idiot I was--she didn't know me--I had only to--" Bernal interrupted. "Are you talking to yourself, or to me?" The rector of St. Antipas turned at one end of his walk. "To both of us, brother. I tell you there has been nothing between us--never anything except the most flawless idealism. I admit that at the moment Nancy observed us the circumstances were unluckily such that an excitable, morbidly suspicious woman might have misconstrued them. I will even admit that a woman of judicial mind and of unhurried judgments might not unreasonably have been puzzled, but I would tear my heart open to the world this minute--'Oh, be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny!'" "If I follow you, old chap, Nancy observed some scene this afternoon in which it occurred to her that I might have been an actor." There was quick pain, a sinking in his heart. "She had reason to know it was one of us--and if I had denied it was I--" "I _see_--why didn't you?" "I thought she must surely have seen me--and besides"--his voice softened with affection--"do you think, old chap, I would have shifted a misunderstanding like that on to _your_ shoulders. Thank God, I am not yet reduced to shirking the penalties of my own blameless acts, even when they will be cruelly misconstrued."