She contrasted his conduct with the grim candour of Julian Maldon, whom she now admired. It was strange and dreadful that both the cousins should be thieves; the prevalence of thieves in that family gave her a shudder. But she could not judge Julian Maldon severely. He did not appear to her as a real thief. He had committed merely an indiscretion. It was his atonement that made her admire him. Though she hated confessions, though she had burnt his exasperating document, she nevertheless liked the manner of his atonement. Whereas she contemned Louis for having confessed. "He thought he was dying and so he confessed!" she reflected with asperity. "He hadn't even the pluck to go through with what he had begun.... Ah! If I had committed a crime and once denied it, I would deny it with my last breath, and no torture should drag it out of me!" And she thought: "I am punished. This is my punishment for letting myself be engaged while Mrs. Maldon was dying." Often she had dismissed as childish the notion that she was to blame for accepting Louis just when she did. But now it returned full of power and overwhelmed her. And like a whipped child she remembered Mrs. Maldon's warning: "My nephew is not to be trusted. The woman who married him would suffer horribly." And she was the woman who had married him. It seemed to her that the warnings of the dying must of necessity prove to be valid. Some mysterious phenomenon on the window-blind at her right hand attracted her attention, and she looked round, half startled. It was the dawn, furtive and inexorable. She had watched dawns, and she had watched them in that very bedroom. Only on the previous morning the dawn had met her smarting and wakeful eyes, and she had imagined that no dawn could be more profoundly sad!... And a little earlier still she had been desolating herself for hours because Louis was going to be careless about his investments, because he was unreliable and she would have to watch ceaselessly over his folly. She had imagined then that no greater catastrophe could overtake her than some material result of his folly!... What a trivial apprehension! What a child she had been! In the excitement and alarm of his accident she had honestly forgotten her suspicions of him. That disconcerted her. She rose from the chair, stiff. The stove, with its steady faint roar of imperfectly consumed gas, had thoroughly heated the room. In careful silence she put the tea-things together. Then she ventured to glance at Louis. He was asleep. He had been restlessly asleep for a long time. She eyed him bitterly in his bandages. Only last night she had been tormented by that fear that his face might be marked for life. Again the trivial! What did it matter whether his face was marked for life or not?...