“You are strangely tolerant,” he said, sitting down near her. “Strangely and sweetly rational—so lenient, that if I did not know you as well as I do, I might imagine that your moral sense is rather misty. Your words, dear girl, make me sick of deceit and hypocrisy, and I shall not try to see myself as you see me. I am worse than you imagine; if you knew all you would not be so ready to invent excuses for me—you would not forgive me.” Then he got up, and added, “But I am glad you came to see me, Fan; your visit has done me ever so much good.”
“Don't send me away so soon, Arthur,” she returned. “What is it that I could not forgive? You should not say that before you put me to the test.”
“Good heavens, Fan, do you wish me to do that? Well, perhaps that would be best. I said that I was sick of deceit, and I ought to have the courage of my opinions. Do you know that when Mr. Tytherleigh called to see you, my lawyers had only just learnt the secret I had discovered several days before?”
“Yes, I knew that.”
“But you don't know—you couldn't imagine why I kept back the information.”
“I thought that the delay was because I had offended you—I didn't think much about it.”
“Of course that was not the reason.”
“Then you must tell me, Arthur.”
“Must I tell you, dear sister? When you left me alone at Kew I asked myself whether it would not be better to conceal what I had heard and marry you. I don't know what madness possessed me. The instant you spoke the words that Margaret Affleck was your mother's name, I was convinced that you were my half-sister—the mystery of something in you, which had always puzzled and baffled me, was made plain. Your voice at times was like my father's voice, and perhaps like my own; and in your face and your expression you are like my father's mother in a miniature of her taken when she was a girl, and which I often used to see. And yet”—he paused and turned his face from her,—“this very conviction that you were so closely related to me made my feeling only stronger. Every scornful word you uttered only made it stronger; it seemed to me that unless I possessed you my life would not be worth having.... Even my father's dying wishes were nothing to me.... And for three days and nights.... How can you forgive me, Fan, when I had it in my heart to do such a thing?”
“But I should not have consented to marry you,” said Fan simply.