“What must you think of me—­”

“I think you have done very wrong, and that our talking about it only makes it worse.  And so—­I’m sorry—­but I must ask you to leave me.”

But he did not leave her.  “And I must ask you to forgive me,” he said gently.

“I?  I have nothing to forgive.  You haven’t done anything to me.  But I should never forgive you if I thought this foolishness could make one moment’s difference to—­to Flossie.”

“It never has made any difference to her,” he replied coldly, “or to my feeling for her.  I never felt towards any woman as I feel towards you.  It isn’t the same thing at all.  Heaven knows I thought I cared enough for her to marry her.  But it seems I didn’t.  That’s why I say it makes no difference to her.  Nothing is altered by it.  As far as Flossie is concerned, whether I marry her or not I shall have behaved abominably.  I don’t know which is the more dishonourable.”

“Don’t you?”

“No.  I only know which I’m going to do.”

She turned her head away.  And that turning away was intolerable.  It was the closing of the door.

“Is it so very terrible to you?” he said gently.

He could not see the tears in her eyes, but he heard them in her voice, and he knew that he had wounded her, Hot in her pride, but in her tenderness and honour—­Lucia’s honour.

“To me?  I’m not thinking of myself—­not of myself at all.  How could I think of myself?  I’m thinking of her.”  She turned to him and let her tears gather in her eyes unheeded.  “Don’t you see what you’ve done?”

Oh, yes; he saw very well what he had done.  He had taken the friendship she had given to him to last his life and destroyed it in a moment, with his own hands.  All for the sake of a subtlety, a fantastic scruple, a question asked, a thing said under some obscure compulsion.  He had been moved by he knew not what insane urgency of honour.  And whatever else he saw he did not see how he could have done otherwise.  The only alternative was to say nothing, to do nothing.  Supposing he had suppressed both his passion and the poems that immortalized it, what would she have thought of him then?  Would she not have thought that he had either dedicated to her a thing that he was afterwards ashamed of, or that he had meant nothing by the dedication?

“Don’t you see what you have done?” she said.  “You’ve made me wish I had never come here and that I’d never seen you again.  It was only the other night—­the dear little girl—­she came up here and sat with me, and we had a talk.  We talked about you.  She told me how she came to know you, and how good you’d been to her and how long it was before either of you knew.  She told me things about herself.  She is very shy—­very reserved—­but she let me see how much she cares—­and how much you care.  Think what you must be to her.  She has no father and no mother, she has nobody but you.  She told me that.  And then—­she took me up to her room and showed me all her pretty things.  She was so happy—­and how can I look at her again?  She would hate me if she knew; and I couldn’t blame her, poor child.  She could never understand that it was not my fault.”