Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/138

130 'You promise?'

'On the sacred honour of a gentleman.'

'Then I invite you to make the inference most directly suggested by the vanity of your researches.'

He looked about him. 'The inference?'

'As to what a fault may have been that it's impossible to find out.'

He got hold as he could. 'It may have been hidden.'

'Then anything hidden, from so much labour, so well'

'May not have existed?' he stammered after she had given him time to take something from her deep eyes. He glared round and round with it—seemed to have it on his hands before the world. 'Then what did you mean?'

'Ah, sir, what did you? You invented my past.'

'Do you mean you hadn't one?' cried Bertram Braddle.

'None I would have mentioned to you. It was you who brought it up.'

He appealed, in his stupefaction, to the immensity of the vacancy itself. 'There's nothing?'

She made no answer for a moment, only looking, while he dropped hard on her sofa, so far away that her eyes might have been fixed on the blue Pacific. 'There's the upshot of your inquiry.'

He followed her, while she moved before him, from his place. 'What did you then so intensely keep back?'

'What did you,' she asked as she paused, 'so intensely put forward? I kept back what you have from me now.'

'This,' he gasped from the depths of his collapse, 'is what you would have told me?'

'If, as my loyal husband, you had brought it up again. But you wouldn't!' she once more declared.

'And I should have gone on thinking'

'Yes,' she interrupted—'that you were, for not bringing it up, the most delicate and most generous of men.'

It seemed all to roll over him and sweep him down, but he