He walked up and down a little longer, smiling to himself, well content. The prospect of the summer seas was before his eyes too. He had counted the cost of the voyage, and set it down at six months' decorous retirement--enough to let people who felt that they must be shocked be shocked at sufficient leisure. After that, he had no fear of not being able to take his place in the world again. Nor need Bernadette fear any extreme cold-shouldering from her friends. It was a case in which everybody would be ready to make excuses, to find the thing more or less pardonable. Why, one had only to tell the story of how, on the eve of the crisis, the threatened husband took to his bed! As Arthur watched Bernadette at dinner, serene, gracious, and affectionate--wary too by reason of that tiny slip--his suspicions seemed to his reason again incredible. Judith must be wrong, and he himself wrong also. And her friend Sir Oliver--so composed, so urbane, so full of interesting talk about odd parts of the world that he had seen and the strange things which had befallen him! Surely people who were doing or contemplating what they were suspected of could not behave like that? That must be beyond human nature? He and Judith must be wrong! But there was something within him which refused the comforting conclusion. Not the old adoration which could see no flaw in her and endure no slur on her perfection. His adoration was eager for the conclusion, and pressed him towards it with all the force of habit and preconception. It was that other, that new, current of feeling which had rushed through him when he stood in the hall and saw them framed, as it were, by the doorway of her room--a picture of lovers, whispered the new feeling, sparing his recollection no detail of pose or air or look. And lovers are very cunning, urged the new feeling, that compound of anger and fear--the fear of another's taking what a man's desire claims for himself. He had honestly protested to Judith that his adoration had been honest, pure, and without self-regard. So it had, while no one shared or threatened it. But now--how much of his anger, how much of his fear, came from loyalty to Godfrey, sorrow for Margaret, sorrow for Bernadette herself, grief for his own broken idol if this thing were true? These were good reasons and motives for fear and anger; orthodox and sound enough. But they had not the quality of what he felt--the heat, the glow, the intense sense of rivalry which now possessed him, the piercing vigilance with which he watched their every word and look and gesture. These other reasons and motives but served to aid--really was it more than to mask?--the change, the transmutation, that had set in at such a pace. Under the threat of rivalry, the generous impulse to protect became hatred of another's mastery, devotion took on the heat of passion, and jealousy lent the vision of its hundred eyes.