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 and frankly, as she treated
all the world of men who had done 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 of the evening with a professor of archaeology from Berlin.

His other resolution was that he would not be with her alone.

But when, a few days after, she wrote asking him to come and see her on
the following afternoon, he made no attempt to excuse himself. This was
a formal challenge.

While she celebrated the rites of tea, and for some little time
thereafter, she joined with such natural ease in his slightly fevered
conversation on matters of the day that he began to hope she had changed
what he could not doubt had been her resolve, to corner him and speak to
him gravely. She was to all appearance careless now, smiling so that he
recalled, not for the first time since that night at the opera, what was
written long ago of a Princess of Brunswick: 'Her mouth has te