"How can I tell?"
"Do you think it is possible"—lifting his disfigured eyes in horrified appeal to his friend—"it is a dreadful hypothesis, but I can think of no other—that that bright intelligence was clouded—that—that her dear little wits were touched when she wrote this?"
"No, I do not think so."
"You—you are not keeping anything from me?"—coming a step nearer, and convulsively clutching his friend's arm—"you—you do not know anything—anything that could throw light upon—upon this? I do not know whether you are conscious of it, but there is something in your manner that might lead me to that conclusion. Do you know—have you heard anything?"
"I know nothing," replies Jim slowly, and looking uncomfortably away from the questioner, "but I conjecture, I fear, I believe that—that——"
"That what? For God's sake, be a little quicker!"
"That—that—there is a—a—something in her past."
Byng falls back a pace or two, and puts up his hand to his head.
"What—what do you mean? What are you talking about? Her past? What"—soaring into extravagance again—"what can there be written on that white page?—so white that it bedazzles the eyes of even the angels who read it."
"I do not know what there is," replies Jim miserably, irritated almost beyond endurance by this poetic flight, and rendered even more wretched than he was before by the rôle that seems to be forced upon him, of conjecturally blackening Elizabeth's character. "How many times must I tell you that I know no more than you, only from—from various indications I have been led to believe that she has something—some great sorrow behind her?"