"I set myself the task of inquiring into the past," Ulrich continued. "I ransacked your life back to its earliest youth. I found scrapes, and even intrigues, in plenty; but of actual wrong-doing nothing till ... up to----"
"What?"
"Your duel with Rhaden."
Leo felt a sensation of something to which he had been clinging giving way within him. With a tired sigh he sank against the back of the chair.
Ulrich leaned over and put his hand on his knee. "Don't try to hide it from me any more," he said. "I see too plainly that I have hit the mark. You would be made of stone and iron if the sight of her who was once his wife did not perpetually remind you of the fact that it is no light or ordinary matter to shoot down like a wild beast, some one who has injured our amour propre, or to let ourselves be so shot down."
"What could I do?" stammered Leo again, without a conception of what his friend was driving at.
"A reconciliation ought to have been patched up. That is to say, don't misunderstand me, I am not blaming you. It would not become me to do so, as I myself was more to blame than you."
"You to blame!"
"Undoubtedly. I was the mediator. I should also have been the peacemaker. And to this day it's a mystery to me that I couldn't manage to avert the consequences of that foolish dispute.... I made bad use of my official opportunity. Rhaden should have been compelled to recall the expression 'unfair,' for it's clear that he only let it escape him in the excitement of the moment. I have judged myself severely enough. I will confess to you that I ask myself sometimes, 'Were you justified in marrying the wife of a man in whose death you had a hand?' Scruples, perhaps of a somewhat pedantic conscience, and only you have the right to reproach me for it."
"Reproach! I?" exclaimed Leo, who at last slowly grasped that this abstruse dreamer, with his punctilious sense of justice, was trying to fasten on himself a guilty responsibility out of his altogether fairy-like version of the facts. Ah, if he only knew!