"Well, there isn't any." He did not speak doggedly or sullenly, as one in fault, but more with the air of a man curiously ready to throw all possible light upon a cloudy phenomenon.
"It's very simple--all that I know about it.

I went there first on the evening of the Madrillon masquerade and played a little comedy for her, so that some of my theatrical allusions--they weren't very illuminating!--to my engagement to Fanchon, made her believe I was Vanrevel when her father told her about the pair of us.

I discovered that the night his warehouses burned--and I saw something more, because I can't help seeing such things: that yours was just the character to appeal to a young girl fresh from the convent and full of honesty and fine dreams and fire.

Nobody could arrange a more fatal fascination for a girl of nineteen than to have a deadly quarrel with her father.

And that's especially true when the father's like that mad brute of a Bob Carewe! Then, too, you're more or less the town model of virtue and popular hero, in spite of the Abolitionism, just as I am the town scamp.
So I let it go on, and played a little at being you, saying the things that you only think--that was all.