After a silence he idly struck a match, watched it burn out, dropped the cinder to the floor:
"There was no question of you at that time," said Grismer, lifting his eyes to Cleland's drawn face. "And I was very desperately in love.... There seemed to be hope that Stephanie might care for me.... Then came that reckless escapade at Albany, where she was recognized by some old friends of your father and by schoolmates of her own....
"Cleland, I would gladly have shot myself then, had that been any solution. But there seemed to be only the one solution.... She has told you, I believe?"
"Yes."
"Well, that was what was done.... I think she cried all the way back. The Albany Post Road seemed like a road through hell to me. I knew then that Stephanie cared nothing for me in that way; that my place in her life served other purposes.
"I don't know what she thought I expected of her—what duty she believed she owed me. I know now that the very thought of wifehood was abhorrent to her.... But she was game, Cleland! ... What line of reasoning she followed I don't know. Whether my love for her touched her, or some generous impulse of renunciation—some childish idea of bringing to me again the inheritance which I had forced on her, I don't know.
"But she was game. She came here that night with her suitcase. She was as white as death, could scarcely speak.... I never even touched her hand, Cleland.... She slept there—behind that curtain on the iron bed. I sat here all night long.
"In the morning we talked it over. And with every generous plucky word she uttered I realized that it was hopeless. And do you know—God knows how—but somehow I kept thinking of you, Cleland. And it was like clairvoyance, almost, for I could not drive away the idea that she cared for you, unknowingly, and that when you came back some day she'd find it out."
He rose from the couch and began to pace the studio slowly, his hands in his pockets.
"Cleland," he said, "she meant to play the game. The bed she had made for herself she was ready to lie on.... But I looked into those grey eyes of hers and I knew that it was pity that moved her, square dealing that nerved her, and that already she was suffering agonies to know what you would think of what she had done—done with a man you never liked—the son of a man whom your father held in contempt because—because he considered him—dishonest!"