Richard Maule slowly got up. Wantele made an instinctive movement to help him, but the other waved him off, not unkindly, but a little impatiently.
"Dick?" he said. "My boy, I want to ask you a question--an indiscreet question. You need not answer it, but if you answer it, please answer it truly."
Wantele opened his mouth and then closed it again. He could not think of the words with which to entreat the other man to desist----
Richard Maule, looking at him, knew the answer to his question before he had uttered it, but even so he spoke, obsessed by the cruel wish _to know_.
"In Italy----?" His voice sank to a muffled whisper, but he did not take his eyes, his suffering, sunken eyes, from Wantele's tortured face.
Still the other did not--could not--speak.
"I knew it. At least I felt sure of it." He sighed a quick convulsive sigh, and then in mercy averted his eyes.
"But never here?" he muttered questioningly. "Everything was over by the time we came back here?"
"I knew that too--at least I felt sure of it. I'm afraid you must have suffered a good bit, Dick?"
The younger man nodded his head. "I have loathed and I have despised myself ever since."
"I'm sorry you did that. I'm sorry I waited till now to tell you that I knew, that I understood."
"How you must have hated me!" said Wantele sombrely.
"Never, Dick. I--I knew her by then. If you had been the first"--he quickly amended his phrase--"if I had been fool enough to believe you were the first, I think it would have killed me. As it was," his voice hardened, "it only made me curse myself for my blind folly--folly which brought wretchedness and shame on you, Dick, and--and now, I fear, on Jane Oglander"--he saw the confirmation he sought on the other's face. "It's about Jane I wish to speak to you to-night. For a moment I ask of you to think of me as God----"
Wantele stared at Richard Maule; it was the first time his cousin had ever uttered the word in his presence.
"If I were God--Providence--Fate--and gave you your choice, would you choose that Lingard should marry Jane or that you should marry her?"
And as Wantele still stared at him in amazement: "Take it from me--I have never deceived you--that the choice is open to you. I don't wish to hurry you. Take a few moments to think it over."