"I wonder you came back to me," she said after an eternal moment.
"Came back?" he echoed, vacantly.
"You seemed to have forgotten my existence!"
Of course the whole wrong, if any wrong had been done to her, was tacit, and much might be said to prove that she felt needlessly aggrieved, and that he could not have acted otherwise than as he did; she herself had owned that it must be an embarrassing position to him.
"Why, what have I done," he began, "what makes you think... For heaven's sake listen to me!" he cried; and then, while she turned a mute attentive face to him, he stood silent as before, like one who has lost his thought, and strives to recall what he was going to say. "What sense,—what use," he resumed at last, as if continuing the course of some previous argument, "would there have been in making a display of our acquaintance before them? I did not suppose at first that they saw us together."... But here he broke off, and, indeed, his explanation had but a mean effect when put into words. "I did not expect them to stay. I thought they would go away every moment; and then at last it was too late to manage the affair without seeming to force it." This was better; and he paused again, for some sign of acquiescence from Kitty, and caught her eye fixed on his face in what seemed contemptuous wonder. His own eyes fell, and ran uneasily over her dress before he lifted them and began once more, as if freshly inspired: "I could have wished you to be known to my friends with every advantage on your side," and this had such a magnanimous sound that he took courage; "and you ought to have had faith enough in me to believe that I never could have meant you a slight. If you had known more of the world,—if your social experience had been greater you would have seen.... Oh!" he cried, desperately, "is there nothing you have to say to me?"
"No," said Kitty, simply, but with a languid quiet, and shrinking from speech as from an added pang. "You have been telling me that you were ashamed of me in this dress before those people. But I knew that already. What do you want me to do?"
"If you give me time, I can make everything clear to you."
"But now you don't deny it."
"Deny what? I—"
But here the whole fabric of Mr. Arbuton's defence toppled to the ground. He was a man of scrupulous truth, not accustomed to deceive himself or others. He had been ashamed of her, he could not deny it, not to keep the love that was now dearer to him than life. He saw it with paralyzing clearness; and, as an inexorable fact that confounded quite as much as it dismayed him, he perceived that throughout that ignoble scene she had been the gentle person and he the vulgar one. How could it have happened with a man like him! As he looked back upon it, he seemed to have been only the helpless sport of a sinister chance.