"Why?" asked May Ford coldly.
"Through fear, through cowardice," exclaimed Lucio Sabini crudely.
Miss Ford was silent, with lowered eyes; her gloved hands grasped the handle of her umbrella. And Lucio, deciding to stretch, with his cruel hands, the wound from which his soul was bleeding, continued:
"Through fear and cowardice I did not open this letter to-day from Lilian Temple, as I have not done for nearly three months—please understand me—I have opened none. You do not believe me? It is not credible? I will fetch her letters."
Convulsively he vanished into the other room and reappeared immediately with the fourteen sealed letters and threw them into Miss Ford's lap.
"There they are. They are all I have received since December: I haven't read them, I tell you, nor opened them. It is abominable, but it is so; it is grotesque, but it is so! I am a man, I am thirty-five, I have seen death, I have challenged death, but I have never dared for three months to open a letter from Lilian. I have no longer had the courage. In fact, the abominable cruelty in not reading what she wrote me, the infamy and grotesqueness of not opening the envelopes, the ignoring of which I believed myself incapable, the cruelty for which I hate and despise myself, I have done through fear and cowardice and through nothing else. Do you understand me?"
Slowly Miss Ford took the letters, one by one, read their addresses, and placed them one on the other in order. Raising her head, she asked, with great, even greater coldness:
"Fear? Cowardice?"
"Yes! Through fear of the suffering caused to myself and others, through not wishing to suffer or know suffering, or see, or measure the sufferings of others."