and steady, "I cannot
again unlearn! I would not if I could!--I have no desire to live in a
fool's paradise! I tried hard this morning--God knows what constraint I
had to put upon myself--to induce you to tell me of your own accord--to
_volunteer_ it--but you would not--you were _resolutely_ silent. Why
were you? Why were you?" (breaking off with an uncontrollable emotion).
"I should not have been hard upon you--I should have made allowances.
God knows we all need it!"

I sit listening in a stony silence: every bit of me seems turned into
cold rock.

"But _now_," he says, regathering his composure, and speaking with a
resolute, stern quiet; "I have no other resource--you have left me
none--but to come to you, and ask point-blank, is this true, or is it
false?"

For a moment, my throat seems absolutely stopped up, choked; there seems
no passage for my voice, through its dry, parched gates. Then at length
I speak faintly: "Is _what_ true? is what false? I suppose you will not
expect me to deny it, before I know what it is?"

He does not at once answer. He takes a turn once or twice up and down
the silent room, in strong endeavor to overcome and keep down his
agitation, then he returns and speaks; with a face paler, indeed, than I
could have imagined any thing so bronzed could be; graver, more austere
than I ever thought I should see it, but still without bluster or
hectoring violence.

"Is it true, then?" he says, speaking in a very low key. "Great God!
that I should have to put such a question to my wife; that one evening,
about a week ago, on the very day, indeed, that the news of my intended
return arrived, you were seen parting with--with--_Musgrave_" (he seems
to have an intense difficulty in pronouncing the name) "at or after
nightfall, on the edge of Brindley Wood, _he_ in a state of the most
evident and extreme agitation, and _you_ in floods of tears!--is it
true, or is it false?--for God's sake, speak quickly!"

But I cannot comply with his request. I am _gasping_. His eyes are upon
me, and, at every second's delay, they gather additional sternness. Oh,
how awful they are in their just wrath! When was father, in his worst
and most thunderous storms, half so dreadful? half so awe-inspiring?

"What sort of an interview could it have been to which there was such a
close?" he says, as if making the reflection more to himself than to me;
"speak! is it true?"

I can no longer defer my answer. One thing or ano