He knew why he had stopped, but the professor did not, and to make the pause and return the letter to its envelope and its place in his pocket without an explanation required something like hardihood.
"She is well, and seems to be taking advantage of the opportunity to rest," he said, and picked up his "Punch" again, returning to his half-finished comment upon its cartoon as if no interruption had taken place.
As he sat on his seat in the park, apparently given up to undivided enjoyment of his cigar, his mind was filled with a tumult of thought. He had not been under the influence of such mental excitement for years. Suddenly he found himself confronting a revelation perfectly astounding to him.
"And so I am the man!" he said, at last. "I am the man!"
He took his cigar out of his mouth and looked at the end of it with an air of deliberate reflection, as is the masculine habit.
"It doesn't say much for me," he added, "that I never once suspected it—not once."
Then he replaced his cigar, with something like a sigh.
"We are a blind lot," he said.
He did not feel the situation a pleasant one; there were circumstances under which he would have resented it with a vigor and happy ingenuity of resource which would have stood him in good stead; but there was no resentment in his present mood. From the moment the truth had dawned upon him, he had treated it without even the most indirect reference to his own very natural feelings, and there had been more sacrifice of himself and his own peculiarities in his action when he had returned the letter to his pocket than even he himself realized.
"It was not the letter to show him," was his thought. "She does not know how much she tells me. He would have understood it as I do."