ther I must say: both
eyes and lips imperatively demand it. Twice, nay _thrice_ I
struggle--struggle mightily to speak, and speak well and truly, and
twice, nay, three times, that base fear strangles my words. Then, at
length--O friends! do not be any harder upon me than you can help, for
indeed, _indeed_ I have paid sorely for it, and it is the first lie that
ever I told; then, at length, with a face as wan as the ashes of a dead
fire--with trembling lips, and a faint, scarcely audible voice, I say,
"No, it is not true!"

"_Not true?_" he echoes, catching up my words quickly; but in his voice
is none of the relief, the restored amenity that I had looked for, and
for the hope of which I have perjured myself; equally in voice and face,
there is only a deep and astonished anger.

"_Not true!_--you mean to say that it is _false_!"

"Yes, false!" I repeat in a sickly whisper. Oh, why, if I _must_ lie, do
not I do it with a bold and voluble assurance? whom would my starved
pinched falsehood deceive?

"You mean to say," speaking with irrepressible excitement, while the
wrathful light gathers and grows intenser in the gray depths of his
eyes, "that this--this _interview_ never took place? that it is all a
delusion; a mistake?"

"Yes."

I repeat it mechanically now. Having gone thus far, I must go on, but I
feel giddy and sick, and my hands grasp the arms of my chair. I feel as
if I should fall out of it if they did not.

"You are _sure_?" speaking with a heavy emphasis, and looking
persistently at me, while the anger of his eyes is dashed and crossed by
a miserable entreaty. Ah! if they had had that look at first, I could
have told him. "Are you _sure_?" he repeats, and I, driven by the fates
to my destruction, while God hides his face from me, and the devil
pushes me on, answer hazily, "Yes, quite sure!"

Then he asks me no more questions; he turns and slowly leaves the room,
and I know that I have lied in vain!

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

And thus I, ingenious architect of my own ruin, build up the barrier of
a lie between myself and Roger. It is a barrier that hourly grows
higher, more impassable. As the days go by, I say to myself in
heart-sickness, that I shall never now cross it--never see it leveled
with the earth. Even when we too are dead it will still rise between us
in the other world; if--as all the nations have agreed to say--there
_be_ another. For my part, I think at this time that, if there is any