They are in love with each other, and yet they both do nothing but hide it.

He is not in the least in love with poor me--not to-day any more than he was three years ago.

He thinks he is, because he is full of sorrow and bitterness, and because the news of our engagement has given him a shock.

But that 's only a pretext--a chance to pour out the grief and pain which have been accumulating in his heart under a sense of his estrangement from Blanche.

He is too proud to attribute his feelings to that cause, even to himself; but he wanted to cry out and say he was hurt, to demand justice for a wrong; and the revelation of the state of things between you and me--which of course strikes him as incongruous; we must allow largely for that--came to him as a sudden opportunity.