“I must beg your pardon, Miss van Tromp, for disturbing you,” he said, addressing himself to Miss Lucilla, who stood in the foreground.  “I shouldn’t have done so if I hadn’t something of great importance to say.”

His voice was so calm that Miss Lucilla could not do otherwise than reply in the same vein of commonplace formality.

“I’m very glad to see you, Monsieur de Bienville.  Won’t you sit down?  I was just going to ring for tea.”

“Thank you,” he said, with a wave of the hand that declined without words the proffered entertainment.  “Perhaps I had better say what I have to say—­and go.”

“Oh, if you think so—!”

Having fulfilled her necessary duties as mistress of the house, she felt at liberty to fall back, leaving Bienville isolated in the doorway.

“Mr. Pruyn,” he said, after further brief hesitation, “I come to make a confession which can scarcely be a confession to any one in this room—­but you.”

Derek grew white to the lips, but remained motionless, while Bienville went on.

“On the way up from South America last spring I said certain things about a certain lady which were not true.  I said them first out of thoughtless folly; but I maintained them afterward with deliberate intent.  When I pretended to take them back, I did so in a way which, as I knew, must convince you further.”

“It did.”

As he brought out the two words, Derek tried to look at Diane, but she was clinging to the arm of old James van Tromp, while her frightened eyes were riveted on Bienville.

“I’m telling you the truth to-day,” Bienville continued, “partly because circumstances have forced my hand, partly because some one whom I greatly respect desires it, and partly because something within myself—­I might almost call it the manhood I’ve been fighting against—­has made it imperative.  I’ve come to the point where my punishment is greater than I can bear.  I’m not so lost to honor as not to know that life is no longer worth the living when honor is lost to me.”

He spoke without a tremor, leaning easily on the cane he held against his hip.

“I must do myself the justice to say that the wrong of which I was guilty had its origin, at the first, in a sort of inadvertence.  I had no intention of doing any one irreparable harm.  I was taking part in a game, but I meant to play it fairly.  The lady of whom I speak would bear me out when I say that the people among whom she and I were born—­in France—­in Paris—­engage in this game as a sort of sport, and we call it—­love.  It isn’t love in any of the senses in which you understand it here.  We give it a meaning of our own.  It’s a game that requires the combination of many kinds of skill, and, if it doesn’t call for a conspicuous display of virtues, it lays all the greater emphasis on its own few, stringent rules.  Like all other sports, it demands a certain kind of integrity, in which the moralist could easily pick