Lilias gave him her company but no other sign of liking; yet her company was of itself sufficient to make him insanely content. Still his fears made him cautious. The prize was too great, the thought of failure too consuming, to admit of risk. So he let the winter go without a word to her of what was eating out his heart, using what chances offered for seeing her, but making none that might attract comment, and all the while attenuating the link that bound him to the other, and trying to accustom her to do without him. He seemed in that to be making headway. She wrote more and more rarely to him, and never in the expansive fashion of the past, and if he kissed her on parting, as occasionally she insisted, it added no warmth to his farewell. Yet he still misdoubted her, and would not have put his fortune to the touch had Fate not forced his hand with the announcement that Miss Anstruther was leaving for India in the spring. He looked in vain for ways to stop her, but shyly, and conscious of a new distance in her manner, as though she thought his interest might be more explicit. On that he spoke. Her evasions, chilly with the disdain of every honest woman for a philanderer, were intolerable. He saw the risk he ran either way of losing her, but chose that which gave him, at any rate, fighting chances, and told her of his love. Three days followed in the blue of heaven; then he came back to earth, and took up his trouble. The other woman was at St. Raphael, so he had to write. He would have vastly preferred to tell her face to face what he had done. He had no courage for a fight in the dark; he wished to see the blow come back, and meet it. But there were reasons insuperable against that. He expected an intemperate reply, but nothing so wildly bereft of reason as that which reached him. It was shrill with threats which turned his blood to ice and then set it boiling with indignation; threats which seemed to echo from some shrieking purlieu of the Mile End Road. Her soul revolted, she wrote, at what he had done. He had thrown her away like stale water. His selfishness had made her life unbearable. Her pride, her capacity for caring, her whole womanhood had been hurt and crushed to death. She went about feeling there was no meaning any more in anything. He had hardened and embittered her nature to a terrible degree. He had hurt her so unendurably that it didn't seem to matter how she hurt others. Love and truth and honour had become a farce, and loyalty was an unnecessary scruple. She ended by saying she did not know how long she could go on bearing it in silence. The only fair thing seemed to be to tell Miss Anstruther everything that had happened, and let her judge between them. Despite the sense of his integrity, and a dreary memory of the months devoted to her whims, Terence almost felt himself to be, as he read her impeachment, the unspeakable brute that she described.