No subterfuge crossed her mind; she thought his midnight visit to the boy's bedside a pretty feature in him; she was full of pity, too; she yielded to the strange request, feeling that it did not become "an old woman" to attach importance even to the public discovery of midnight interviews involving herself as one, and feeling also that she was being treated as an old friend in the form of a very old woman. Her mind was bent on arresting any recurrence to the project she had so frequently outlined in the tongue of innuendo, of which, because of her repeated tremblings under it, she thought him a master. He conducted her along the corridor to the private sitting-room of the ladies Eleanor and Isabel. "Deceit!" he said, while lighting the candles on the mantelpiece. She was earnestly compassionate, and a word that could not relate to her personal destinies refreshed her by displacing her apprehensive antagonism and giving pity free play. CHAPTER XXXI SIR WILLOUGHBY ATTEMPTS AND ACHIEVES PATHOS Both were seated. Apparently he would have preferred to watch her dark downcast eyelashes in silence under sanction of his air of abstract meditation and the melancholy superinducing it. Blood-colour was in her cheeks; the party had inspirited her features. Might it be that lively company, an absence of economical solicitudes, and a flourishing home were all she required to make her bloom again? The supposition was not hazardous in presence of her heightened complexion. She raised her eyes. He could not meet her look without speaking. "Can you forgive deceit?" "It would be to boast of more charity than I know myself to possess, were I to say that I can, Sir Willoughby. I hope I am able to forgive. I cannot tell. I should like to say yes." "Could you live with the deceiver?" "No." "No. I could have given that answer for you. No semblance of union should be maintained between the deceiver and ourselves. Laetitia!" "Sir Willoughby?" "Have I no right to your name?" "If it pleases you to . . ." "I speak as my thoughts run, and they did not know a Miss Dale so well as a dear Laetitia: my truest friend! You have talked with Clara Middleton?" "We had a conversation." Her brevity affrighted him. He flew off in a cloud. "Reverting to that question of deceivers: is it not your opinion that to pardon, to condone, is to corrupt society by passing off as pure what is false? Do we not," he wore the smile of haggard playfulness of a convalescent child the first day back to its toys, "Laetitia, do we not impose a counterfeit on the currency?" "Supposing it to be really deception."