answers, as the crucial moment
approached, but wrote freely from day to day, as he felt inclined.
There was little which he did not tell her in the dozen or fifteen
letters he penned in the course of the month. Like many reticent men who
have never taken up a pen except for ordinary correspondence or for the
routine work of a business requiring accuracy, and who all at once begin
to write the history of their daily lives for the perusal of one trusted
person, Orsino felt as though he had found a new means of expression and
abandoned himself willingly to the comparative pleasure of complete
confidence. Like all such men, too, he unconsciously exhibited the chief
fault of his character in his long, diary-like letters. That fault was
his vanity. Had he been describing a great success he could and would
have concealed it better; in writing of his own successive errors and
disappointments he showed by the excessive blame he cast upon himself,
how deeply that vanity of his was wounded. It is possible that Maria
Consuelo discovered this. But she made no profession of analysis, and
while appearing outwardly far colder than Orsino, she seemed much more
disposed than he to yield to unexpected impulses when she felt their
influence. And Orsino was quite unconscious that he might be exhibiting
the defects of his moral nature to eyes keener than his own.

He wrote constantly therefore, with the utmost freedom, and in the
moments while he was writing he enjoyed a faint illusion of increased
safety, as though he were retarding the events of the future by
describing minutely those of the past. More than once again Maria
Consuelo answered him, and always in the same strain, doing her best,
apparently, to give him hope and to reconcile him with himself. However
much he might condemn his own lack of foresight, she said, no man who
did his best according to his best judgment, and who acted honourably,
was to be blamed for the result, though it might involve the ruin of
thousands. That was her chief argument and it comforted him, and seemed
to relieve him from a small part of the responsibility which weighed so
heavily upon his shoulders, a burden now grown so heavy that the least
lightening of it made him feel comparatively free until called upon to
face facts again and fight with realities.

But events would not be retarded, and Orsino's own good qualities tended
to hasten them, as they had to a great extent been the cause of his
embarr