“You have certainly been very badly treated,” said Aimée, her eyes softening with sympathy at the memory of his wrongs. “I hope you don’t think I forget it, or that I can ever cease to blame Fanny; but—but making things worse can not make them better. And it seems to me that you can only make them worse by staying here.”
“As far as Miss Berrien is concerned,” he said, as they walked toward the bench and seated themselves, “I assure you that I have not the least desire to make them either worse or better. It seems strange—does it not?”—he broke off abruptly, “that this time yesterday I was looking at the setting sun filled with thoughts of her, and longings for the moment that would bring us together, and that now there is not a woman whom I know in the world that I would not sooner entertain the thought of marrying. It is a great change to be wrought in twenty-four hours. And do you know what has chiefly wrought it?”
“Her conduct, I suppose,” answered Aimée. “It was bad enough to have wrought anything; and yet,” she added, reflectively, “I don’t really believe that Fanny herself thinks it was very bad. She is—light, you know.”
“Yes,” assented Kyrle, dryly, “very light. However, what she thinks is a matter of no importance. And it is not her conduct to me that has chiefly wrought the change of which I speak, but her conduct to you.”
“To me?” said Aimée, looking up at him with a startled expression. “Oh, pray, don’t think of that. You don’t understand—Fanny never meant to do me any harm. I was perfectly willing to go last night, and it was not her fault that Mr. Meredith, instead of going home, as he should have done, stayed on the sea wall and saw me.”
“Pardon me,” said Kyrle, “but I think it was distinctly her fault. To have sent you on such an errand was in itself absolutely inexcusable; but afterward to let it be supposed that you went of your own accord—that you were the person about to elope—there is no language strong enough to characterize such cowardly duplicity. You wonder why I am still here? It is because I determined to see you, and say to you that if you do not tell the truth, I will. This shameful deception, this trading on the generosity of a child, shall not continue.”
Aimée looked up at him. When had she seen any one so moved with indignation and generous wrath? She thought again that this man was far from the ductile wax Fanny Berrien imagined him to be; but, righteous as his resentment and anger were, it would not do to allow him to act upon them. Yet how could she hope to influence or bend the fiery resolution that breathed in his look and words?
“It is too late,” she said at last. “I have promised, and I have made others promise, that things shall be left as they are, and nothing would induce me to speak. Fanny is selfish and thoughtless, but she never intended deception. It all—came about because Mr. Meredith frightened her, and she was afraid to tell the truth. Fanny is a little of a coward, you know. She is very sorry—really sorry, I assure you; but if she told Mr. Meredith now, he would never forgive her.”
“And so you advise her to continue to deceive a man whose affection for her should entitle him at least to fair dealing?” said Kyrle, bitterly. “Is a man, then, never certain of truth from a woman? In Fanny Berrien I am not surprised. But your eyes look as if you ought to know what honor and honesty are.”
The eyes of which he spoke filled with tears. No other reproach could have cut Aimée so deeply. Twenty-four hours earlier she would have said that honor and honesty were the forces that would always rule her life; and now—she could not deny that from this high standard she had ignominiously fallen. And how was it possible to explain what compelling impulse of gratitude had made it seem a duty to violate the strongest instincts implanted in her nature? She looked at Kyrle with the overbrimming crystal drops almost ready to fall, and he, meeting the pained humility of that look, felt as if he had struck a helpless child.