("Yes, yes," her heart cried out, "I believe in him, _because_ he didn't tell the truth about that letter to Horace." She could have loved him for that lie.) He was now at liberty to part with her on that understanding, leaving her to think him all that was disinterested and honourable and fine. But he could not do it. Not in the face of her almost impassioned declaration of belief. At that moment he was ready rather to fall at her feet in the torture of his shame. And as he looked at her, tears came into his eyes, those tears that cut through the flesh like knives, that are painful to bring forth and terrible to see. "I've not been an honest man, though. I've no right to let you believe in me." Her face was sweeter than ever with its piteous, pathetic smile struggling through the white eclipse of grief. "What have you done?" "It's not what I've done. It's what I didn't do. I told you that I knew the library was going to be sold. I told you that yesterday, and you naturally thought I only _knew_ it yesterday, didn't you?" "Well, yes, but I don't see--" She paused, and his confession dropped into the silence with an awful weight. "I knew--all the time." She leaned back in her chair, the change of bodily posture emphasizing the spiritual recoil. "All the time, and you never told me?" "All the time and I never told you. I'd _almost_ forgotten when you offered me that secretaryship, but I knew it when I let you engage me; I knew it before I came down. I never would have come if I'd realized what it meant, but when I did know, I stayed all the same." "What do you think you ought to have done?" "Of course--I ought to have gone away--since I couldn't be honest and tell you." "And why" (she said it very gently but with no change in her attitude), "why couldn't you be honest and tell me?" "I'm not sure that I'd any right to tell you what I hadn't any right to know. I'm only sure of one thing--as I did know, I oughtn't to have stayed. But," he reiterated sorrowfully, "I did stay." "You stayed to help me." "Yes; with all my dishonesty I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't made myself believe that. As it's turned out, I've helped to ruin you." "Please--please don't. As far as I'm concerned you've nothing to reproach yourself with. Your position was a very difficult one." "I ought never to have got into it." "Still, you did your best." "My best! You can't say I did what an honourable man would have done; I mean at the beginning." "No--no. I'm afraid I can't say that." He did not expect anything but sincerity from her, neither did he desire that her sense of honour should be less fine than his. But he longed for some word of absolution, some look even that should reinstate him in his self-esteem; and it seemed to him that there was none. "You can't think worse of me than I think myself," he said, and turned mournfully away. She sat suddenly upright, with one hand on the arm of her chair, as if ready to rise and cut off his retreat.