“Explain myself!” she repeated.  “Oh! is there another man like this in the world?  I spare him, when my heart is breaking; I screen him when my own character is at stake; and he—­of all human beings, he—­turns on me now, and tells me that I ought to have explained myself!  After believing in him as I did, after loving him as I did, after thinking of him by day, and dreaming of him by night—­he wonders I didn’t charge him with his disgrace the first time we met:  ’My heart’s darling, you are a Thief!  My hero whom I love and honour, you have crept into my room under cover of the night, and stolen my Diamond!’ That is what I ought to have said.  You villain, you mean, mean, mean villain, I would have lost fifty diamonds, rather than see your face lying to me, as I see it lying now!”

I took up my hat.  In mercy to her—­yes!  I can honestly say it—­in mercy to her, I turned away without a word, and opened the door by which I had entered the room.

She followed, and snatched the door out of my hand; she closed it, and pointed back to the place that I had left.

“No!” she said.  “Not yet!  It seems that I owe a justification of my conduct to you.  You shall stay and hear it.  Or you shall stoop to the lowest infamy of all, and force your way out.”

It wrung my heart to see her; it wrung my heart to hear her.  I answered by a sign—­it was all I could do—­that I submitted myself to her will.

The crimson flush of anger began to fade out of her face, as I went back, and took my chair in silence.  She waited a little, and steadied herself.  When she went on, but one sign of feeling was discernible in her.  She spoke without looking at me.  Her hands were fast clasped in her lap, and her eyes were fixed on the ground.

“I ought to have done you the common justice to explain myself,” she said, repeating my own words.  “You shall see whether I did try to do you justice, or not.  I told you just now that I never slept, and never returned to my bed, after you had left my sitting-room.  It’s useless to trouble you by dwelling on what I thought—­you would not understand my thoughts—­I will only tell you what I did, when time enough had passed to help me to recover myself.  I refrained from alarming the house, and telling everybody what had happened—­as I ought to have done.  In spite of what I had seen, I was fond enough of you to believe—­no matter what!—­any impossibility, rather than admit it to my own mind that you were deliberately a thief.  I thought and thought—­and I ended in writing to you.”

“I never received the letter.”