“I have not discussed you with her,” he answers, very solemnly, and still looking at me with that profound and greedy eagerness in his eyes; “with no living soul would I discuss my wife—­I should have hardly thought I need tell you that!  What I heard, I heard by accident.  She—­as I believe, in all innocence of heart—­referred to—­the—­the—­ circumstance, taking it for granted that I knew it—­that you had told me of it, and I—­I—­” (raising his clinched right hand to emphasize his speech)—­“I take God to witness, I had no more idea to what she was alluding—­as soon as I understood—­she must have thought me very dull—­” (laughing hoarsely)—­“for it was a long time before I took it in—­but as soon as I understood to what manner of anecdote it was that she was referring—­then, at once, I bade her be silent!—­not even with her, would I talk over my wife!”

He stops.  He has risen from his chair, and is now standing before me.  His breath comes quick and panting; and his face is not far from being as white as mine.

“But what I have learned,” he continues presently, in a low voice, that, by a great effort, he succeeds in making calm and steady, “I cannot again unlearn!  I would not if I could!—­I have no desire to live in a fool’s paradise!  I tried hard this morning—­God knows what constraint I had to put upon myself—­to induce you to tell me of your own accord—­to volunteer it—­but you would not—­you were resolutely silent.  Why were you?  Why were you?” (breaking off with an uncontrollable emotion).  “I should not have been hard upon you—­I should have made allowances.  God knows we all need it!”

I sit listening in a stony silence:  every bit of me seems turned into cold rock.

“But now” he says, regathering his composure, and speaking with a resolute, stern quiet; “I have no other resource—­you have left me none —­but to come to you, and ask point-blank, is this true, or is it false?”

For a moment, my throat seems absolutely stopped up, choked; there seems no passage for my voice, through its dry, parched gates.  Then at length I speak faintly:  “Is what true? is what false?  I suppose you will not expect me to deny it, before I know what it is?”

He does not at once answer.  He takes a turn once or twice up and down the silent room, in strong endeavor to overcome and keep down his agitation, then he returns and speaks; with a face paler, indeed, than I could have imagined any thing so bronzed could be; graver, more austere than I ever thought I should see it, but still without bluster or hectoring violence.

“Is it true, then?” he says, speaking in a very low key.  “Great God! that I should have to put such a question to my wife; that one evening, about a week ago, on the very day, indeed, that the news of my intended return arrived, you were seen parting with—­with—­Musgrave” (he seems to have an intense difficulty in pronouncing the name) “at or after nightfall, on the edge of Brindley Wood, he in a state of the most evident and extreme agitation, and you in floods of tears!—­is it true, or is it false?—­for God’s sake, speak quickly!”