She turned to him again. There was a look in her face that he had never seen there before, and it struck through to his heart. It was the dawning of hostility, which put her apart from him as nothing else could have done; for it meant that there were tracts in her as yet unexplored, and perhaps unsuspected, and there was no knowing what arid spaces he would have to traverse in them. "I can't understand it at all," she said quietly. "Why did you send him away, and why did he go? I _know_ he loves me; and he knows I love him, and forgive him anything that was wrong. What _is_ wrong? You ought to tell me that." He stirred uneasily in his seat. How could he tell her what was wrong? She was so innocent of evil. If he felt, as he did, that Lassigny's desire for her touched her with it, he had diverted that from her. He couldn't plunge her into it again by explanations that would only justify himself. "Darling child," he said. "It's all wrong. You must trust me to know. I've made no mistake. If he had been what the man who marries you must be he wouldn't have gone away from me as he did, in offence. He'd have justified himself, or tried to. And I'd have listened to him too. As it was, I don't think we were together for ten minutes. He gave you up, B. He was offended, and he gave you up--before I had asked him to. Yes, certainly before I had said anything final." She looked out of the window again. "I wish I knew what had happened," she said as quietly as before. "I can't understand his giving me up--of his own free will. I wish I knew what you had said to him." This hardened him a little. He did not want to make too much of Lassigny's having so easily given up his claims. He was not yet sure that he had entirely given them up. But, at any rate, the offence to his pride had been enough to have caused him to do so unconditionally for the time being. Beatrix had been given up for it without a struggle to retain her, and it was not Beatrix's father who had made any conditions as to his seeing her or writing to her again, or had needed to do so. Yet she would not accept it, that the renunciation could have been on the part of the man whom she hardly knew. It must have been some injustice or harshness on his part, from whom she had had nothing but love all her life. "It doesn't matter what I said to him, or what he said to me," he answered her. "If he had been the right sort of man for you nothing that I said to him would have caused him offence. He took offence, and withdrew. You must accept that, B darling. I didn't, actually, send him away. I shouldn't have sent him away, if he had justified himself to me in any degree. You know how much I love you, don't you? Surely you can trust me a little?"