“Why should your friendship be so terrible a thing for a woman? Why should it bring a man to his senses?”
“Oh, dearest! for God’s sake, don’t ask questions the answers to which will only hurt you?”
“But I must know, Maryon,” she said proudly. “I have never lived amongst lies and shadows. Everything must be clear and clean about me. If you are innocent in this matter—of what is it then that you are guilty?”
The mad longing of the unshriven soul for confession swept over him then. He too would have all clear and clean about him, for once and all, cost what it might.
“Oh, just of being a blackguard,” he said, and all the pent-up bitterness, and self-mockery and self-loathing of years came out in the low-spoken words. “Just of being a scoundrel and a coward as far as women are concerned—of robbing, looting—taking all and giving nothing in return—playing pirate and cut-throat in the great game of love, careless of what anyone suffered.”
“You!” she whispered. “You whom I have looked upon as a knight of chivalry—a Galahad—all that was fine and noble!”
“Oh! Diane, I have never pretended to be any of these things—never wanted you to believe it—I am only common earth—common or garden earth. But such as I am, I love you—I ask you to take me with all my sins.”
There was a long silence.
“But why, Maryon?—What changed you from the man God meant you to be, to this?”
She loved him. For all her wounded pride and anger and horror, for all his black sins, she loved him, as women will love through everything, in spite of everything; and she longed for some word of extenuation that would justify the forgiveness she could not withhold.