"Never! they have only to look at you and hear you speak, to see what you are."
"Honor said it was not enough to be good but to avoid doing the things that make people think we are not. Now they are thinking perhaps that I flirt with you and let you kiss me!" Her face was suffused with crimson shame. Nothing was so horrible to contemplate as the fact that he had kissed her! She was stripped of self-respect forever.
Dalton might have been tempted to smile at her self-accusing attitude had it not been for her perfect sincerity. He felt overcome with contrition and longed to atone.
"You make me infinitely ashamed," he said humbly. "Perhaps if you knew what went towards making me such a brute-beast, you would feel just a little sorry for me and understand—even bring yourself to like me a little bit as you say you once did. I have never had a sister. It might have made a difference if I had." After a pause—"Some years ago there were two persons in whom I believed as—I believe—in God. One was a woman and the other, my dearest pal. He and I were like brothers. I would have trusted him with my life. I did more. I trusted him with my honour." A pause. "And he whom I trusted and loved, robbed me of all that made life dear to me, and of what I valued more than life. And the woman I loved and believed pure and true, conspired with him to betray my honour! I was their dupe. A blind confiding fool!"
"Oh!" was wrung sympathetically from Joyce.
"When I found out all I went mad, I think. I have been pretty mad—and bad—ever since; but at the time, if I could have laid hands on both I might have ended my career on the gallows. But Fate intervened. He was killed in a railway accident shortly afterwards, and a year later, she came whining to me for forgiveness."
"Did you forgive her?"
Dalton's eyes glowed with cruelty and an undying contempt. "Forgive her? Not if she had been dying! There are things impossible to forgive. She had killed my soul, destroyed my faith in human nature—which others, since, have not helped to restore!—turned me into a very devil, and without an incentive to live. Do you think I could forgive her? If I hated her then, I loathe the very memory of her now."
"Yet you tried your best to make me one of the same sort?" Joyce asked wonderingly.
"I did not believe, till you proved it to me, that women are of any other sort," he replied.