“So you think I'm a faithless man too, do you?” demanded Mavering stormily.
“Not from your point of view,” said Boardman, who kept on quietly eating and drinking.
Mavering was too amiable not to feel Boardman's innocence of offence in his unperturbed behaviour. “There was no faithlessness about it, and you know it,” he went on, half laughing, half crying, in his excitement, and making Boardman the avenue of an appeal really addressed to Alice. “I was ready to do what either side decided.”
“Or both,” suggested Boardman.
“Yes, or both,” said Dan, boldly accepting the suggestion. “It wouldn't have cost me a pang to give up if I'd been in the place of either.”
“I guess that's what she could never understand,” Boardman mused aloud.
“And I could never understand how any one could fail to see that that was what I intended—expected: that it would all come out right of itself—naturally.” Dan was still addressing Alice in this belated reasoning. “But to be accused of bad faith—of trying to deceive any one—”
“Pretty rough,” said Boardman.
“Rough? It's more than I can stand!”
“Well, you don't seem to be asked to stand it,” said Boardman, and Mavering laughed forlornly with him at his joke, and then walked away and looked out of Boardman's dormer-window on the roofs below, with their dirty, smoke-stained February snow. He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped his face with it. When he turned round, Boardman looked keenly at him, and asked, with an air of caution, “And so it's all up?”