"Well, I suppose I oughtn't."
"But to whom did you say them?"
He evidently tried to remember, but it dropped--he had lost it.
"I don't know!"
He almost smiled at me in the desolation of his surrender, which was indeed practically, by this time, so complete that I ought to have left it there. But I was infatuated--I was blind with victory, though even then the very effect that was to have brought him so much nearer was already that of added separation.
"Was it to everyone?" I asked.
"No; it was only to--" But he gave a sick little headshake.
"I don't remember their names."
"Were they then so many?"
"No--only a few. Those I liked."
Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent.
It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he WERE innocent, what then on earth was _I_? Paralyzed, while it lasted, by the mere brush of the question, I let him go a little, so that, with a deep-drawn sigh, he turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward the clear window, I suffered, feeling that I had nothing now there to keep him from. "And did they repeat what you said?"
I went on after a moment.
He was soon at some distance from me, still breathing hard and again with the air, though now without anger for it, of being confined against his will.
Once more, as he had done before, he looked up at the dim day as if, of what had hitherto sustained him, nothing was left but an unspeakable anxiety.
"Oh, yes," he nevertheless replied--"they must have repeated them.
To those THEY liked," he added.
There was, somehow, less of it than I had expected; but I turned it over.