“What? ah, my dear Josephine, you are something of a sophist. Just think for a moment and you will see how impossible it was for me to accept what you said in the sense in which you now say you meant it. You told me that the one reason--the sole reason you had for writing to me as you wrote, and for appealing to me as you did, was the fact that the secrecy--the secret--the secret that you shared with me was preying on your mind. Well, that sole reason is now removed, therefore--oh, the thing is simplicity itself.” “That is perfectly plausible,” said she, after a long interval. She saw without difficulty that he had logic and reason on his side. That made her feel a greater antipathy to him than she had yet felt: a woman hates the man who has proved himself to be in the right. “Yes, it is perfectly plausible, but--but--you did not tell me that you intended coming to my father.” “And you did not know enough of my character to know that the first step I should take after hearing from your lips that the fact of our engagement being kept from him was causing you pain, would be to go to your father?” There was more than a suggestion of reproach in his voice: there was pain. “I did not know enough of your character,” she said. “And so I considered myself free--altogether free. No engagement existed between us when we parted last.” “Although my last words to you were that I knew I could trust you? Did not those words suggest to you that you had not made your meaning plain to me--that I at least had no feeling that our engagement was at an end?” “I felt that--that you were setting me free with one phrase and trying to bind me faster than before with another phrase,” she replied. “But you made no protest. You tacitly admitted that I was entitled to accept your meaning as I did.” “You did not give me a chance. You turned away to speak to some one who came up at that moment.” “What would you have said to me if you had had the chance?” he asked her slowly. She hesitated. “Oh, do not trouble yourself thinking for an answer,” he cried. “What is the good of discussing in this way the--diplomatists call it the _status quo ante?_ Such a discussion is quite profitless. Even if we were not engaged then we are now. The obstacle has been removed.” She felt overcome by the plausibility of it all, just as she had felt overcome in the presence of her father by a sense of the inevitable. It was not surprising that he accepted the long pause on her part as indicating complete surrender to his reasoning. He went towards her with a smile and outstretched hands. “Do not come to me: I love another man and I mean to marry him--I shall never marry you,” she said quietly. CHAPTER XXVII So she had abandoned the untenable position of reason, and had withdrawn to the cover of a statement of complete femininity. She gave a sigh of relief: she knew where she was now. She was on firm ground.