Page:Imre.pdf/175

173 How shall I thank you for your confidence, as well as for your affection?"

"Ah, my letters! Bother my letters! They said nothing much! You know I cannot write letters at all. What is more, you have been believing that I wrote you as... as a sort of duty. That whatever I said—or a lot of it—well, there were things which you fancied were not really I. I understood why you could think it."

"I never said that, Imre," I replied, sitting down beside him on the sofa.

"Not in so many words. But my guilty conscience prompted me. I mean that word, "conscience" Oswald. For—I have not been fair to you, not honest. The only excuse is that I have not been honest with myself. You hare thought me cold, reserved, abrupt... a fantastic sort of friend to you. One who valued you, and yet could hardly speak out his esteem a careless fellow into whose life you have taken only surface-root. That isn't all. You have believed that I... that I... never could comprehend things... feelings... which you have