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Yes.

Why?

My story is not very nice, is it?

But you have come.

Bertha sent me a message to come.

But for that ?

But for that I should not have come.

Did it strike you that if you had gone without coming here I should have understood it—in my own way?

Yes, it did.

What, then, do you wish me to believe?

I wish you to believe that I failed. That Bertha is yours now as she was nine years ago, when you—when we—met her first.

Do you want to know what I did?

No.

I came home at once.