I had underrated you.
You congratulated me on my prudence in leaving the sick bed, on my sudden flight downstairs.

"It was an ugly moment for you," you said, "uglier than you imagine." Ah! I felt it but too well.

What it had really meant I do not know; whether you had with you the pistol you had bought to try to frighten your father with, and that thinking it to be unloaded, you had once fired off in a public restaurant in my company; whether your hand was moving towards a common dinner knife that by chance was lying on the table between us; whether forgetting in your rage your low[50] stature and inferior strength, you had thought of some special personal insult, or attack even, as I lay ill there; I could not tell.

I do not know to the present moment.

All I know is that a feeling of utter horror had come over me, and that I had felt that unless I left the room at once and got away, you would have done or tried to do something that would have been, even to you, a source of lifelong shame....
On your return to town from the actual scene of the tragedy to which you had been summoned, you came at once to me very sweetly and very simply, in your suit of woe, and with your eyes dim with tears.