"See, chère Madame, see," he said; "do you perhaps remember, this winter, in the week of the great snow, when I came to tell you I was summoned to my cousins' home in England? You were not quite, quite kind. You mocked me a little, suggesting a solution of the problems raised by my impending visit. The solution you proposed was, as I ventured to explain to you, impossible then. It remained impossible to the end, the cruel end, and for the same reason."
His manner changed. His voice deepened.
"Yet, believe me, when by degrees, against my will, against my respect for my cousin and sincere desire for her happiness, the fact of her unfortunate partiality was brought home to me, I tried with all my strength to command my heart. Twice I faced the situation without reserve, and tried to submit, to sacrifice myself, rather than cause her humiliation and distress."
Adrian looked away across the crowded, pleasant room, with its scent of autumn flowers, cedar, and sandalwood, and its many shaded lights. His lips worked, but at first no sound passed them.
"I could not do it," he said. "I could not. I loved you too much."
He raised his hand from the arm of la belle Gabrielle's chair, turning proudly upon her, as a man who on his trial fiercely protests his own innocence.
"I had given her no cause for her disastrous delusion—before God, Madame, I had not. And my passion, too, has its authority, its unalienable rights. I could not, I dared not, betray them. It may be that the happiness to which I aspire will never be granted me. Very well. I shall suffer, but I shall know how to accommodate myself. But to cut myself off voluntarily from all hope of that happiness by marriage with another woman was like asking me to mutilate myself. I refused. Could the situation repeat itself, I should again refuse, although when I read her terrible journal and learned the reason of my cousin's suicide I was consumed by remorse, by grief and self-reproach."
Adrian paused.
"Now I have told you everything, Madame," he added, quietly. "I leave myself in your hands. It is for you to condemn or to acquit me, to judge whether I have behaved as an honorable man, whether I have done right."
After a silence, a pathetic bewilderment in her mysterious eyes, Gabrielle St. Leger answered brokenly: