"You are determined not to reveal your secret," he began, "but I want to come to an understanding with you on one point. If I guess it, if I put my finger on it, will you give me the satisfaction of owning that I have done so."
Lingard hesitated.
"Yes," he said, "I will do so on one condition—your word of honour, your oath, never to tell it to any human being."
"Not to—her—Daisy?"
"Least of all."
Philip groaned. This did not look very promising for the meeting with Daisy, which at the bottom of his heart he believed in as his last—his trump card.
Still, he had gained something.
"Then, my first question seems, in the face of that, almost a mockery. I was going to ask you," and he half gasped—"it is nothing—nothing about her that is at the root of all this misery? No fancy," again the gasp, "that—that she doesn't care for you, or love you enough? No nonsense about your not being suited to each other, or that you couldn't make a girl of her sensitive, high-strung nature happy?"
"No," said Arthur, and the word seemed to ring through the room. "No, I know she loves me as I love her. Oh, no, not quite like that, I trust," and his voice was firm through all the tragedy of the last sentence. "And I believe I could have made her very happy. Leave her name out of it now, Phil, once for all. It has nothing to do personally with the woman who is, and always will be, to me my perfect ideal of sweetness and excellence and truth and beauty."
"Then it has to do with yourself," murmured Keir. "Come, the radius is narrowing. I flew out at poor Trevannion when he suggested it, but all the same, it's nothing in your past you're ashamed of that's come to light, is it? The best fellows in the world make fools of themselves sometimes, you know. Don't mind my asking."