I heard, astonished.
“She? Who?” I demanded.
“O, Monsieur!” he said, “why equivocate? She who you informed me was your sister, or your step-sister, and who is in fact nothing of the kind.”
Answer of any sort for the moment failed me. Then, “She told you that?” I asked quietly.
“She told me.”
“What provoked her to it?”
“I—I!” He uplifted both his face and hands despairingly, apostrophising the moonlit heavens; then dropped them in dejection. “I taunted her with you, and she answered in a fury. For myself, I had never but half believed in that story; and, in the bitterness of my rejected vanity, I goaded her to the admission—alas, to what result!”
I stood canvassing the forlorn creature, even with some contemptuous pity in my heart.
“Rejected?” I said. “Then I am to understand you have tried and failed?”
“Failed,” he repeated, in a voice of grief.