elf. For it was all my fault. It all came
about through me, through my weakness, my cursed weakness, my cursed
weakness and whining for help." He grew scarlet in the dark, realizing
how his pride in his strength, his quiet assumption with Hermione that
he was the stronger, must often have made her marvel, or almost weep.
"I called you away. I called you to Africa. And if I hadn't it would all
have been different."

"No, it would all have been the same."

Artois started. Out of the darkness a voice, a low, cold, inexorable
voice had spoken--had spoken absolute truth, correcting his lie:

"It would all have been the same!"

The woman's unerring instinct had penetrated much further than the
man's. He had been feeling the shell; she plucked out the kernel. He
had been speaking of the outward facts, of the actions of the body; she
spoke of the inward facts, of the actions of the soul. Her husband's sin
against her was not his unfaithfulness, the unfaithfulness at the Fair,
but the fact that all the time he had been with her, all the time she
had been giving her whole self to him, all the time that she had been
surrounding him with her love, he had retained in his soul the power
to will to commit it. That he had been given an opportunity to sin was
immaterial. What was material was that he had been capable of sinning.

Artois saw his lie. And he stood there silent, rebuked, waiting for the
voice to speak again. But it did not speak. And he felt as if Hermione
were silently demanding that he should sound the deeper depths of truth,
he who had always proclaimed to her his love of truth.

"Perhaps--yes, it would have been the same," he said. "But--but--" His
intention was to say, "But we should not have known it." He checked
himself. Even as they formed themselves in his mind the words seemed
bending like some wretched, flabby reed.

"It would have been the same. But that makes no difference in my
conduct. I was weak and called to you. You were strong and came to me.
How strong you were! How strong it was of you to come!"

As if for the first time--and indeed it was for the first time--he
really and thoroughly comprehended her self-sacrifice, the almost
bizarre generosity of her implacably unselfish nature. He measured the
force of her love and the greatness of her sacrifice, by the depth of
her disillusion; and he began to wonder, almost as a child wonders at
things, how he had been able during all these years quite sim