hen he
remembered suddenly his steward's wife he must have exclaimed _eureka_
with particular exultation. One does not like to call Anthony an ass.
But really to put any woman within scenting distance of such a secret and
suppose that she would not track it out!

No woman, however simple, could be as ingenuous as that. I don't know
how Flora de Barral qualified him in her thoughts when he told her of
having done this amongst other things intended to make her comfortable. I
should think that, for all _her_ simplicity, she must have been appalled.
He stood before her on the appointed day outwardly calmer than she had
ever seen him before. And this very calmness, that scrupulous attitude
which he felt bound in honour to assume then and for ever, unless she
would condescend to make a sign at some future time, added to the
heaviness of her heart innocent of the most pardonable guile.

The night before she had slept better than she had done for the past ten
nights. Both youth and weariness will assert themselves in the end
against the tyranny of nerve-racking stress. She had slept but she woke
up with her eyes full of tears. There were no traces of them when she
met him in the shabby little parlour downstairs. She had swallowed them
up. She was not going to let him see. She felt bound in honour to
accept the situation for ever and ever unless . . . Ah, unless . . . She
dissembled all her sentiments but it was not duplicity on her part. All
she wanted was to get at the truth; to see what would come of it.

She beat him at his own honourable game and the thoroughness of her
serenity disconcerted Anthony a bit. It was he who stammered when it
came to talking. The suppressed fierceness of his character carried him
on after the first word or two masterfully enough. But it was as if they
both had taken a bite of the same bitter fruit. He was thinking with
mournful regret not unmixed with surprise: "That fellow Fyne has been
telling me the truth. She does not care for me a bit." It humiliated
him and also increased his compassion for the girl who in this darkness
of life, buffeted and despairing, had fallen into the grip of his
stronger will, abandoning herself to his arms as on a night of shipwreck.
Flora on her side with partial insight (for women are never blind with
the complete masculine blindness) looked on him with some pity; and she
felt pity for herself too. It was a rejection, a casting out; nothing
new