"Let me come with you, then. We will both leave Miss Murray to enjoy her inheritance in peace."
"No, that would not be just."
"Just! What do I care for justice?" said Dino, indignantly, while his eyes grew dark and his cheeks crimson with passionate feeling. "I care for you, for her, for the happiness of you both. Can I do nothing towards it?"
"Nothing, I think, Dino mio."
"But you will stay with me until you go? You will not cast me off as you have cast off your other friends? Promise me."
"I promise you, Dino," said Brian, laying his hand soothingly on the other's shoulder. It seemed to him that Dino must be suffering from fever; that he was taking a morbidly exaggerated view of matters. But his next words showed that his excitement proceeded from no merely physical cause.
"I have done you no harm, at any rate," he said, rising and holding Brian's hand between his own. "I have made up my mind. I will have none of this inheritance. It shall either be yours or hers. I do not want it. And I have taken the first step towards ridding myself of it."
"What have you done?" said Brian.
"Will you ever forgive me?" asked Dino, looking half-sadly, half-doubtfully, into his face. "I am not sure that you ever will. I have betrayed you. I have said that you were alive."
Brian's face first turned red, then deathly pale. He withdrew his hand from Dino's grasp, and took a backward step.