uin on that deeper self which had its life in those about her.

So much had become clear to her when she heard Amherst declare his
intention of laying the facts before Mr. Langhope. His few broken words
lit up the farthest verge of their lives. She saw that his
retrospective reverence for his wife's memory, which was far as possible
removed from the strong passion of the mind and senses that bound him to
herself, was indelibly stained and desecrated by the discovery that all
he had received from the one woman had been won for him by the
deliberate act of the other. This was what no reasoning, no appeal to
the calmer judgment, could ever, in his inmost thoughts, undo or
extenuate. It could find appeasement only in the renunciation of all
that had come to him from Bessy; and this renunciation, so different
from the mere sacrifice of material well-being, was bound up with
consequences so far-reaching, so destructive to the cause which had
inspired his whole life, that Justine felt the helpless terror of the
mortal who has launched one of the heavenly bolts.

She could think of no way of diverting it but the way she had chosen.
She must see Mr. Langhope first, must clear Amherst of the least faint
association with her act or her intention. And to do this she must
exaggerate, not her own compunction--for she could not depart from the
exact truth in reporting her feelings and convictions--but her husband's
first instinctive movement of horror, the revulsion of feeling her
confession had really produced in him. This was the most painful part of
her task, and for this reason her excited imagination clothed it with a
special expiatory value. If she could purchase Amherst's peace of mind,
and the security of his future, by confessing, and even
over-emphasizing, the momentary estrangement between them there would be
a bitter joy in such payment!

Her hour with Mr. Langhope proved the correctness of her intuition. She
could save Amherst only by effacing herself from his life: those about
him would be only too ready to let her bear the full burden of obloquy.
She could see that, for a dozen reasons, Mr. Langhope, even in the first
shock of his dismay, unconsciously craved a way of exonerating Amherst,
of preserving intact the relation on which so much of his comfort had
come to depend. And she had the courage to make the most of his desire,
to fortify it by isolating Amherst's point of view from hers; so that,
when the hour was ov