"When did I lie to you?"
"You cannot have forgotten. That day in the shack, the first day I met you."
"That is easily explained." Crabbe continued to look at and think of his pipe, oblivious of the white countenance behind him. "I spoke after a fashion. The thing—I mean our relations—amounted virtually to a marriage. The difference was in your thought—in your mind. You pictured a ceremony, a religious rite, whereas I intended to convey the idea of a state, a mutual feeling——"
"You allowed me to think of a ceremony, you encouraged me to think of it."
"Nothing of the sort. Besides, I was not sober at the time. Make allowances, my Christian friend, always make allowances."
"Then what of the child? If you mentioned anything it should have been the child."
At this Crabbe turned, and so sudden was his movement that Ringfield retreated as if caught guiltily; in doing so he very nearly slipped on the icy rocks that sloped imperceptibly towards the rushing fall, and he was about to warn the guide, who was farther down the bank than himself when the latter, rising abruptly, cried:—
"The child? What child? There never was any child. Thank heaven, we were spared that complication!"
"You deny it? You deny it in the face of the likeness, of the stories of the village and the entire countryside; in face of the misery its existence has caused her—the mother, and of the proof in your own sodden, embruted condition, in face of her own admission——"
"Admission? It is impossible she can have admitted what never occurred. What did she say?"