She has risen to her feet again, risen to her full height (how tall she is!); and once again stands confronting him, not even asking the table-edge for any support. 'And--you--told--me--that--you--were--free!' The words drop wonderingly from her mouth, barbed with an icy contempt that makes him writhe. But at least he thanks God that she does not treat him to such mirth as Betty's. 'I told you the truth,' rejoins the poor fellow doggedly--'I _was_ free; I _am_ free!' But the consciousness of the impossibility of really clearing his character, save at the expense of her whom he must for ever shield, lends a flatness and unreality to his assertion, which, as he feels through every aching fibre, will only serve the more deeply to convince Peggy of his guilt. It is not long before he sees that he has divined justly. 'You need not make a laughing-stock of me,' she says with dignity, turning towards the door. But at that, the despair which has been paralysing him awakes, and cries out loud, giving him motion and a voice. 'You are not going!' he cries in a tone whose agony stabs her like a knife, flinging himself upon her passage. 'What is there to stay for?' she answers, choked. But she pauses. Can he, even yet, have anything to say? 'Do you think that I met her there _on purpose_?' he asks, his words pouring out in a hoarse eager flood, as if he had but little hope of commanding her attention for long to them--'by appointment? Ask yourself whether it is possible? Was I so anxious to leave you? Was not it you that drove me away? I tell you I had no more idea of meeting her than I had of meeting----' he hesitates, seeking for a comparison strong enough to emphasise his denial--'as I had of meeting one of the dead. I did not even know that she was in the neighbourhood. I had held no communication with her for months. It was an accident--a mere accident!' He breaks off suffocated. At the intense sincerity of his tone, a sincerity which it is difficult to believe feigned, a sort of stir has come over her face; but in a moment it has gone again. 'Was it,' she asks with a quietness that makes his hopes sink lower than would any noisy tears or tantrums, 'was it _by accident_ that she was in your arms?' He is silent. In point of fact, he is as innocent of that embrace as Peggy herself; but from telling her so he is, being a man and an Englishman, for ever debarred. He must stand there, and bear the consequences of that supposed guilt, whatever those consequences may be. There is a little stillness while he waits his sentence--a little stillness broken only by the eight-day clock's tick-tack, and by the distance-mellowed sounds of the village rising to go about its daily work. 'Have you nothing to say for yourself, then?' she asks at last, in a voice which she dares not raise above a whisper for fear of its betraying her by altogether breaking down--'no explanation to give?'