"My dear, he didn't know; he was greatly afraid it would be just the other way. But since you say that, I must tell you he is within a hundred yards of where you stand, waiting in the road to know whether you would see him or not." Nan was annoyed at this; it was giving romantic colour to a meeting which should have been perfectly natural and dispassionate on both sides; and on hers it was too dispassionate, and not natural enough, in consequence. Yet she wore a flush which might have flattered a less vain man than Ralph Devenish; and as for him he looked nicer than she had ever known him, in the shabby suit which was the best that remained of his Australian outfit, with the deep bronze upon his sallow face, and with inches added to his splendid whiskers. There was also, in him, a strange absence of arrière-pensée, psychologically more interesting than she dreamed; it was he who told her of Denis, unasked, in perhaps his second breath. "Oh, I did decently," said Ralph, "and might have done really well had I stuck to it. But that cousin of mine--that's the man! He had some luck, though no more than he deserved; but when I came away he was the talk of his gully, to say the least. If he has realized half the prophecies I heard before I left he must be a wealthy man by this time." "Do you mean to say he has been lucky from the beginning?" asked Nan, her incredulity strangely tinctured with disgust; and she brightened as perversely when she heard the truth. For it was the truth about Denis, so far as he knew it, that Ralph told Nan this April evening. He was cast for he knew not what part of bold duplicity; all he saw clearly was the end, and to that he was prepared to plough his way through all dishonour, as a traveler steels himself against every obstacle between him and the one light twinkling through the trees. The light was very brilliant in this sweet spring dusk, before his eyes yet not within his reach. It dazzled him, the light of the face he loved; and love he did, the more passionately, not the less, for the sacrifice of his honour that he had made already in his heart. To look through the sweet English dusk into her eyes, to hear her voice through the evensong of the dear old English birds, was to feel a final hardening of every unscrupulous resolve. And yet honour dies hard in the type to which Ralph Devenish belonged; it was dying so hard in Ralph that he was glad to tell the truth while he might, glad to speak well and kindly of the man he was to thwart in life by fair means or by foul. So Nan heard of Denis's early unsuccess, and was thankful; a proud silence she could understand and might learn to forgive. And she was only less grateful for the way Ralph spoke of him; yet be it remembered to Ralph's credit, or what was left of it, that his tone, if assumed, was no device to win Nan's gratitude as it actually did.