He was extraordinarily disturbed. If he had not questioned her himself he would not have believed this thing. There had been something so fresh and clear to him about Caroline, she had matched himself in straightforwardness; her word had been charged with truth, and over and again she had given evidence of such unusual qualities that he had unconsciously endowed her with wisdom beyond her years, and regarded her mental outlook as peculiarly well balanced. Not even the great overthrow of his life's sweetest task had moved him more sharply than he was moved now. Indeed, then he had been partially prepared. As he had put it himself to Caroline, he had felt that the creature he loved was slipping gradually but surely out of his grasp; he had been conscious that the butterfly he had caught and chained was fluttering restlessly (albeit the chain was a glittering one), and he had nerved himself for the pronouncement that his love was wearying, his devotion exacting. And when all this had come, he had met it quietly, as something that was inevitable. But he had suffered none the less. All things he had expected from Camilla except the thing she had done. And the astounding conviction of her disloyalty had been hardly more startling than this curious phase of her nature which Caroline had revealed this night. He had, like Agnes Brenton, found it possible to pardon in Camilla many, many things that would have been unforgivable in others, because he took her mental construction into consideration first of all; because he regarded her as a child, a headstrong, foolish, sweet, irresponsible child, with all the innocence that belongs to extreme youth, and because he knew she had been from the beginning surrounded by the most disastrous influences. And Camilla had shown him how mistaken he had been to treat her with such tender thought. So now with Caroline. He had placed her apart; he realized now that he had thought of her as something fragrant and beautifying, and with her own lips she had confessed herself capable of a sympathy for a man who was brutal, vulgar, coarse in heart and mind. Were all women so framed? Or was it merely his destiny to be denied knowledge of woman in her true personification? The woman of sweetest compassion and bravest comradeship; that figure of nobility and modesty of whom poets had sung from ages uncounted and for whose purity and honour men had died in centuries gone. His mother had shown him one side of the picture, Camilla the reverse; now Caroline added her touch.