Bartlett.—"Do you mean to say that this is the young girl who was jilted in that way? Who—Do you mean— Do you intend to tell me— Do you suppose—Cummings"—
Cummings.—"Yes, yes, yes!"
Bartlett.—"Why, man, she's in Paris, according to your own showing!"
Cummings.—"She was in Paris three weeks ago. They have just brought her home, to help her hide her suffering, as if it were her shame, from all who know it. They are in this house by chance, but they are here. I mean what I say. You must believe it, shocking and wild as it is."
Bartlett, after a prolonged silence in which he seems trying to realise the fact.—"If you were a man capable of such a ghastly joke—but that's impossible." He is silent again, as before. "And I— What did you say about me? That I look like a man who"— He stops and stares into Cummings's face without speaking, as if he were trying to puzzle the mystery out; then, with fallen head, he muses in a voice of devout and reverent tenderness: "That—that—broken—lily! Oh!" With a sudden start he flings his burden upon the closed piano, whose hidden strings hum with the blow, and advances upon Cummings: "And you can tell it? Shame on you! It ought to be known to no one upon earth! And you—you show that gentle creature's death-wound to teach something like human reason to a surly dog like me? Oh, it's monstrous! I wasn't worth it. Better have let me go, where I would, how I would. What did it matter what I thought or said? And I—I look like that devil, do I? I have his voice, his face, his movement? Cummings, you've over-avenged yourself."
Cummings.—"Don't take it that way, Bartlett. It is hideous. But I didn't make it so, nor you. It's a fatality, it's a hateful chance. But you see now, don't you, Bartlett, how the sight of you must affect them, and how anxious her father must be to avoid you? He most humbly asked your forgiveness, and he hardly knew how to ask that you would not let her see you again. But I told him there could be no question with you; that of course you would prevent it, and at once. I know it's a great sacrifice to expect you to go"—
Bartlett.—"Go? What are you talking about?" He breaks again from the daze into which he had relapsed. "If there's a hole on the face of the earth where I can hide myself from them, I want to find it. What do you think I'm made of? Go? I ought to be shot away out of a mortar; I ought to be struck away by lightning! Oh, I can't excuse you, Cummings! The indelicacy, the brutality of telling me that! No, no,—I can't overlook it." He shakes his head and walks away from his friend; then he returns, and bends on him a look of curious inquiry. "Am I really such a ruffian"—he speaks very gently, almost meekly, now—"that you didn't believe anything short of that would bring me to my senses? Who told you this of her?"
Cummings.—"Her father."
Bartlett.—"Oh, that's too loathsome! Had the man no soul, no mercy? Did he think me such a consummate beast that nothing less would drive me away? Yes, he did! Yes, I made him think so! Oh!" He hangs his head and walks away with a shudder.
Cummings.—"I don't know that he did you that injustice; but I'm afraid I did. I was at my wits' end."