“I wrote to Mr. Jewdwine as soon as I heard of Sir Frederick Harden’s death.  Still, you’re right, I did lose time; and time was everything.  You can’t reproach me more than I reproach myself.”

“My dear man, I’m not reproaching you.  I only want to know what you’re going to do?”

“Do?  Is there anything left for me to do?”

“Not much, that I can see.”

“If I’d only spoken straight out in the beginning—­”

“Do you mean to her?”

“To her.”  He whispered the pronoun so softly that it sounded like a sigh.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I?  I can see it was the one honest thing to do.  But I thought I’d no business to know about her father’s affairs if she didn’t; and certainly no business to talk about them.”

“No.  I don’t see how you could have done it.”

“All the same I’d made up my mind to do it that morning—­when the telegram came.  That stopped me.”

“You were well out of it.  You don’t know what an awful thing it would have been to do.  She worshipped her father.  Is this what you’ve been making yourself ill about?”

“I suppose so.  You know how adorably kind she was to me?”

“I can guess.  She is adorably kind to every one,” said Kitty, gentle but astute.

“And, you see, I’ve behaved dishonourably to her.”

“No.  I don’t see that.”

“Don’t you?  Don’t you?  Why, my father sent me partly as his agent, and all the time she believed I was only working for her.”

“Did you behave as your father’s agent?”

“No.  But I let her slave from morning till night over that catalogue.”

“Which she would have done in any case.”

“Don’t you see that I ought to have backed out of it altogether, in the very beginning?”

“Ah yes—­if everybody did what they ought.”

“I tried twice, but it was no good.  I suppose I didn’t try hard enough.”

“What good would you have done by going, if she wanted you to stay?”

“That’s how I argued.  But the fact is, I stayed because I couldn’t go away.  Of course, it was an abominable position, but I assure you it felt like heaven when it didn’t feel like ’ell.”

His anguish, mercifully, was too great for him to feel the horror of his lapse.  And Kitty hardly noticed it; at any rate she never felt the smallest inclination to smile, not even in recalling it afterwards.

It was, if you came to think of it, an unusual, a remarkable confession.  But she remembered that he had had a nervous fever; it was his nerves, then, and his fever that had cried out, a cry covered, made decent almost, by the clangour of the sea.