She had spoken pleasantly to him of her travels, of her settlement in
London and of people whom they both knew.

During the last half of the opera, which he had stayed in the box to
hear, he had been conscious of nothing, as he sat behind them, but the
angle of her cheek and the mass of her hair, the lines of her shoulder
and arm, her hand upon the cushion. The black hair had seemed at last a
forest, immeasurable, pathless and enchanted, luring him to a fatal
adventure. At the end he had been pale and subdued, parting with them
rather formally.

The next time he saw her--it was at a country house where both were
guests--and the subsequent times, he had had himself in hand. He had
matched her manner and had acquitted himself, he thought, decently,
considering ... considering that he lived in an agony of bewilderment
and remorse and longing. He could make nothing, absolutely nothing, of
her attitude. That she had read his manuscript, and understood the
suspicion indicated in his last question to her at White Gables, was
beyond the possibility of doubt. Then how could she treat him thus
amiably and frankly, as she treated all the world of men who had done
her no injury?

For it had become clear to his intuitive sense, for all the absence of
any shade of differentiation in her outward manner, that an injury had
been done, and that she had felt it. Several times, on the rare and
brief occasions when they had talked apart, he had warning from the same
sense that she was approaching this subject; and each time he had turned
the conversation with the ingenuity born of fear. Two resolutions he
made. The first was that when he had completed a commissioned work which
tied him to London he would go away, and stay away. The strain was too
great. He no longer burned to know the truth; he wanted nothing to
confirm his fixed internal conviction by faith, that he had blundered,
that he had misread the situation, misinterpreted her tears, written
himself down a slanderous fool. He speculated no more on Marlowe's
motive in the killing of Manderson. Mr. Cupples returned to London, and
Trent asked him nothing. He knew now that he had been right in those
words--Trent remembered them for the emphasis with which they were
spoken--"So long as she considered herself bound to him ... no power on
earth could have persuaded her." He met Mrs. Manderson at dinner at her
uncle's large and tomb-like house in Bloomsbury, and there he conversed
most