“Why hideous?” I demanded, quite clear-headed, and quite determined that now or never the overscored slate of suspicion should be wiped clean. I still forlornly and foolishly felt, I suppose, that he might yet usher before me some miraculously simple explanation that would wipe his scutcheon clean, that would put everything back to the older and happier order. But as I heard his deep-wrung cry of “Oh, what’s the good of all this?” I knew that life wasn’t so romantic as we’re always trying to make it.
“I’ve got to know,” I said, as steel-cold as a surgeon.
“But can’t you see that it’s—that it’s worse than revolting to me?” he contended, with the look of a man harried beyond endurance.
“Why should it be?” I exacted.
He sank down in the low chair with the ranch-brand on its leather back. It was an oddly child-like movement of collapse. But I daren’t let myself feel sorry for him.
“Because it’s all so rottenly ignoble,” he said, without looking at me.
“For whom?” I asked, trying to speak calmly.
“For me—for you,” he cried out, with his head in his hands. “For you to have been faced with, I mean. It’s awful, to think that you’ve had to stand it!” He reached out for me, but I was too far away for him to touch. “Oh, Tabby, I’ve been such an awful rotter. And this thing that’s happened has just brought it home to me.”
“Then you cared, that much?” I demanded, feeling the bottom of my heart fall out, for all the world like the floor of a dump-cart.
“No, no; that’s the unforgivable part of it,” he cried in quick protest. “It’s not only that I did you a great wrong, Tabby, but I did her a worse one. I coolly exploited something that I should have at least respected. I manipulated and used a woman I should have been more generous with. There wasn’t even bigness in it, from my side of the game. I traded on that dead woman’s weakness. And my hands would be cleaner if I could come to you with the claim that I’d really cared for her, that I’d been swept off my feet, that passion had blinded me to the things I should have remembered.” He let his hands fall between his knees. Knowing him as the man of reticence that he was, it seemed an indescribably tragic gesture. And it struck me as odd, the next moment, that he should be actually sobbing. “Oh, my dear, my dear, the one thing I was blind to was your bigness, was your goodness. The one thing I forgot was how true blue you could be.”