As he sat on his seat in the park, apparently given up to undivided enjoyment of his cigar, his mind was filled with a tumult of thought. He had not been under the influence of such mental excitement for years. Suddenly he found himself confronting a revelation perfectly astounding to him. "And so _I_ am the man!" he said, at last. "_I_ am the man!" He took his cigar out of his mouth and looked at the end of it with an air of deliberate reflection, as is the masculine habit. "It doesn't say much for me," he added, "that I never once suspected it--not once." Then he replaced his cigar, with something like a sigh. "We are a blind lot," he said. He did not feel the situation a pleasant one; there were circumstances under which he would have resented it with a vigor and happy ingenuity of resource which would have stood him in good stead; but there was no resentment in his present mood. From the moment the truth had dawned upon him, he had treated it without even the most indirect reference to his own very natural feelings, and there had been more sacrifice of himself and his own peculiarities in his action when he had returned the letter to his pocket than even he himself realized. "It was not the letter to show him," was his thought. "She does not know how much she tells me. He would have understood it as I do." He went over a good deal of ground mentally as he sat in the deepening dusk, and he thought clearly and dispassionately, as was his habit when he allowed himself to think at all. By the time he had arrived at his conclusions it was quite dark. Then he threw the end of his last cigar away and arose, and there was no denying that he was pale still, and wore a curiously intense expression. "If there is one thing neither man nor devil can put a stop to," he said, "it is an experience such as that. It will go on to one of two ends,--it will kill her, or she will kill it. The wider of the mark they shoot, the easier for her; and as for me," he added, with a rather faint and dreary smile, "perhaps it suits me well enough to be merely an alleviating circumstance. It's all I'm good for. Let them think as they please." And he brushed an atom of cigar-ash from his sleeve with his rather too finely feminine hand, and walked away. CHAPTER XVI. He paid the professor another visit a few days later, and afterwards another, and another. "What," said the professor, at the end of his second visit, "is it ten o'clock? I assure you it is usually much later than this when it strikes ten."