Thus I saw myself.  My very hair began to rise and to tingle.  How had I dared to make this proposal to Dorothy?  And as Dorothy was silent, and looked down as we walked, poking with her parasol at pebbles in the road, I was in a tense anxiety to know with what words she would break the oppressive pause between us.  “I could see,” she said, “that you liked me; and of course you wouldn’t come so far to see me if you didn’t.  And you must know that Reverdy’s friendship for you makes a difference.  Do you know...?”

Dorothy lost her voice.  The tears came out of her eyes.  As she did not speak I began again, trying to say for her what she did not say for herself.  “There’s Zoe,” I said.  And then Dorothy quite lost control of herself.  She wept piteously.  And then she grew calmer.  She had faced the reluctant fact when I spoke Zoe’s name.  We had stumbled up and over that roughness in the road.  Any rut or obstacle in it might now be easier endured ... if worse was not to come.

Yes, these stories about me.  Had Dorothy heard them?  And the life I had taken for Zoe’s sake.  I was sure Dorothy had not heard of that.  Even the first was a subject difficult to approach.  I was twenty, Dorothy was nineteen.  But the greatest obstacle was the age in which we lived.  Women now draped themselves in mystery.  There were whole realms of subjects that were not talked between the sexes.  We managed things by mild indirections, by absurd circumlocutions.

I began to think of the letter that Lamborn had written Zoe.  I was carrying it in my pocket.  Did it not prove Lamborn’s interest in Zoe?  I handed it to Dorothy, thinking that it would disprove my interest in Zoe, of which I had been made self-conscious by the accusations; and not realizing that Dorothy probably knew nothing of all these charges.  “Read this,” I said, handing it to Dorothy.

Dorothy took it in at a glance, for it was only a few lines beginning “Dear Zoe.”  It was an invitation to Zoe to meet Lamborn again at the same place.  Dorothy’s face turned crimson.  She handed the note back to me without a word.  I had to struggle with the tough materials of the revelation that I wished to make.  And I went on to tell Dorothy that the author of the note was Lamborn.  “You remember him?” I asked.  Dorothy nodded her head.  “Well,” I continued, “he is dead, thank God.  I killed him.”

Dorothy was overcome.  She reeled.  After a moment, in which she found her breath again, she faced about and began to walk toward the town.

I followed, hurt and crushed; for Dorothy had suddenly changed her whole manner.  Her face was impenetrable; and it had paralyzed my hope with its expression of self-withdrawal, something almost of anger.  I could not go on now and tell my story:  that I had killed Lamborn because of his offense against Zoe, because of his menacing attitude toward me, because of the vile things he had said about Zoe.  No! nothing I could say now would be in place.  I had blundered, perhaps.  We walked to the house, silent all the way.