"I don't understand you," he murmured, sweeping his hand in a dazed way over his brow. "You saw him then? Spoke to him? Impossible!"
"It is not a man to whom I allude," I returned, almost as much agitated as himself. "It is a woman who is your accuser, a woman who seems to feel she has a right to make you suffer, possibly because she has suffered so much herself."
"A woman!" was all he said; "a woman!" turning pale enough now, God knows.
"Have you no enemies among the women?" I asked, wearied to the soul with the position in which my cruel fate had forced me.
"I begin to think I have," he answered, giving me a look that somehow broke down the barriers of ice between us and made my next words come in a faltering tone:
"And could you stop to bestow a thought upon a man while a woman held your secret? Did you think our sex was so long-suffering, or this special woman so generous——"
I did not go on, for he had leaped the gap which separated us and had me gently but firmly by the arm.
"Of whom are you speaking?" he demanded. "What woman has my secret—if secret I have? Let me hear her name, now, at once."
"Is it possible," I murmured, "that you do not know?"
"The name! the name!" he reiterated, his eyes ablaze, his hand shaking where it grasped my arm.