s was an implication that he would find me alone.

IV

When accordingly at five she presented herself I naturally felt false
and base. My act had been a momentary madness, but I had at least to be
consistent. She remained an hour; he of course never came; and I could
only persist in my perfidy. I had thought it best to let her come;
singular as this now seems to me I thought it diminished my guilt. Yet
as she sat there so visibly white and weary, stricken with a sense
of everything her husband's death had opened up, I felt an almost
intolerable pang of pity and remorse. If I didn't tell her on the
spot what I had done it was because I was too ashamed. I feigned
astonishment--I feigned it to the end; I protested that if ever I had
had confidence I had had it that day. I blush as I tell my story--I take
it as my penance. There was nothing indignant I didn't say about him; I
invented suppositions, attenuations; I admitted in stupefaction, as the
hands of the clock travelled, that their luck hadn't turned. She smiled
at this vision of their "luck," but she looked anxious--she looked
unusual: the only thing that kept me up was the fact that, oddly enough,
she wore mourning--no great depths of crape, but simple and scrupulous
black. She had in her bonnet three small black feathers. She carried
a little muff of astrachan. This put me by the aid of some acute
reflection a little in the right, She had written to me that the
sudden event made no difference for her, but apparently it made as much
difference as that. If she was inclined to the usual forms why didn't
she observe that of not going the first day or two out to tea? There
was some one she wanted so much to see that she couldn't wait till her
husband was buried. Such a betrayal of eagerness made me hard and cruel
enough to practise my odious deceit, though at the same time, as the
hour waxed and waned, I suspected in her something deeper still than
disappointment and somewhat less successfully concealed. I mean a
strange underlying relief, the soft, low emission of the breath that
comes when a danger is past. What happened as she spent her barren hour
with me was that at last she gave him up. She let him go for ever. She
made the most graceful joke of it that I've ever seen made of anything;
but it was for all that a great date in her life. She spoke with her
mild gaiety of all the other vain times, the long game of hide-and-seek,
the unprecedented queerness of su