Desperately he faced round. It had got to be done.
"I kept back your book—kept it back for six weeks—hid it away so that no one else should see it. I hated it ... your book that contained the idea of my book—God! shall I ever forget the reading of it! And then I thought ... if only I could get mine done first; get it in first, and published first.... It was the same idea, you see—just the same idea. And it wasn't fair——"
He halted; came slowly back to the fire; stood looking down into it, head steadily averted from her eyes ... the gold-shot gold-veiled green of her eyes. Then he went on more coherently:
"It was quite fair; yours was ready first, so it ought to have had first chance with the public. I took it home to read in my official capacity; and just because of that, it was unspeakable that I should have done such a thing—to you, dear, now that I know you ... and to anyone. Pat O'Neill was just a name to me. I imagined him an ambitious boy—a boy with genius, who was bound to get there in the long run. But I was middle-aged, and a failure, and this one idea had come to me—and I could write only this one book; it was my justification. Oh, all this is no excuse. I have no excuse. I'm only telling you how it happened...."
Would she speak now? Say that she was disappointed?—more than that: utterly contemptuous; not because it was her own career he had tampered with, but because Patricia O'Neill could not condone—meanness. Would she never speak? He stood longing for absolution; honestly ashamed—yet shame not unmixed with a queer strain of gladness that he should have challenged her attention, stamped his personality upon her consciousness, with anything so definite as a confession.
"Is your book finished yet?"
"No."
"Then why did you send up mine ... after all?"
He looked at her now. "You know why...."
"Say it!" her mandate was imperial.