when you came into this room alone.
Should you have opened it and examined the contents?'

'I should not--you know it.'

'Very well. You would simply have taken it for granted that I was to be
trusted to look after my own affairs, until I asked someone else's aid
or advice. Is not that the case at present?'

A man more apt at dissimulation would have treated the matter from the
first with joking irony, and might have carried his point, though with
difficulty. Wilfrid had not the aptitude, to begin with, and he was
gravely disturbed. His pulses were throbbing; scarcely could he steady
his voice. He dreaded a disclosure of what might well be regarded as
throwing doubt upon his sincerity, the more so that he understood in
this moment how justifiable such a doubt would be. After the merriment
of a few minutes ago, this sudden shaking of his nerves was the harder
to endure. It revived with painful intensity the first great agitations
of his life. His way of speaking could not but confirm Beatrice's
suspicions.

'We are not exactly strangers to each other,' she said, coldly.

'No, we are not; yet I think I should have forborne to press you on any
matter you thought it needless to speak of.'

She put on her hat. Wilfrid felt his anger rising--our natural emotion
when we are disagreeably in the wrong, yet cannot condemn the cause
which has made us so. He sat to the table again, as if his part in the
discussion were at an end.

Beatrice stood for some moments, then came quickly to his side.

'Wilfrid, have you secrets from me?' she asked, the tremor of her voice
betraying the anguish that her suspicions cost her. 'Say I am
ill-mannered. It was so, at first; I oughtn't to have said anything. But
now it has become something different. However trifling the matter, I
can't bear that you should refuse to treat me as yourself. There is
nothing, nothing I could keep from you. I have not a secret in my life
to hide from you. It is not because they are letters--or not only that.
You put a distance between us you say there are affairs of yours in
which I have no concern. I cannot bear that! If I leave you, I shall
suffer more than you dream. I thought we were one. Is not your love as
complete as mine?'

He rose and moved away, saying--

'Open it! Look at the letters!'

'No, that I can't do. What can it be that troubles you so? Are they
letters that I _ought_ not to see?'

He could bear it no longer.

'Yes,' he answered, b