The boarder on the floor below, who had heard him walking to and fro on the first New Year's night he had spent in Washington, and on many a night since, heard his firm, regular tread again during the half hour in which Richard told, in fitful outbursts, what he had not found himself equal to telling before. It was not easy to tell it in a very clear and connected manner; it was necessary to interlard it with many explanations and extenuations, and even when these were supplied there was a baldness about the facts, as they gradually grouped themselves together, which it was not agreeable to contemplate; and Richard felt this himself gallingly. "I know how it appears to you," he said; "I know how it sounds! That is the maddening side of it,--it looks so much worse than it really is! There is not a man living who would accuse me of intentional wrong. Confound it! I seem to have been forced into doing the very things it was least natural to me to do! Bertha herself would say it,--she would understand it. She is always just and generous!" "Yes," said the colonel; "I should say she had been generous." "You mean that I have betrayed her generosity!" cried Richard. "That, of course! I expected it." "You will find," said the colonel, "that others will say the same thing." He had heard even more than his worst misgivings had suggested to him, and the shock of it had destroyed something of his self-control. For the time being he was in no lenient mood. "I know what people will say!" Richard exclaimed. "Do you suppose I have not thought of it a thousand times? I know what I should say if I did not know the circumstances. It is the circumstances that make the difference." "The fact that they are your circumstances, and not another man's," began Tredennis; but there he checked himself. "I beg your pardon," he said, coldly. "I have no right to meet your confidence with blame. It will do no good. If I can give you no help, I might better be silent. There were circumstances which appeared extenuating to you, I suppose." He was angered by his own anger, as he had often been before. He told himself that he was making the matter a personal cause, as usual; but how could he hear that her very generosity and simplicity had been used against her by the man who should have guarded her interests as his first duty, without burning with sharp and fierce indignation. "If I understand you," he said, "your only hope of recovering what you have lost lies in the success of the Westoria scheme?" "Yes," answered Amory, with his forehead on his hands, "that is the diabolical truth!" "And you have lost?" "Once I was driven into saying to you that if the thing should fail it would mean ruin to me. That was the truth, too." The colonel stood still. "Ruin to you!" he said. "Ruin to your wife--ruin to your children--serious loss to the old man who"--