He has flushed a dark red, and now turns as if to walk straight away up the road and out of the Rector’s ken for ever. But suddenly he halts and looks back, and Mr. Barry, who has seen many phases of life and is quick to discern the truth, however deep in the well it lies, beckons to him to return. If this young man cannot clear himself, he may still plead circumstances. ‘If you could explain, Wyndham.’ ‘That’s what offends me,’ says Wyndham, with some passion. He has refused to return an inch, so the Rector has had to go to him. It wouldn’t do to shout his conversation, considering all the young people who live on one side of the road behind the right-hand wall, and the one ‘young person’ (the Rector has the gravest suspicions) who lives on the other side of it. What if they should all chance to hear? Wyndham is still talking. ‘Why should I have to explain? You have known me many years, Mr. Barry. Of what’—looking him fair in the face—‘do you accuse me?’ ‘That hardly requires an answer,’ says Mr. Barry calmly. And all at once Wyndham knows that the trouble he had dreamed of is already on him. There is gossip rife in the neighbourhood about him and this mysterious tenant of his cottage. People are talking—soon it will come to the old man’s ears, and to his aunt’s, and to Josephine’s. The last idea is the least troublesome. ‘You must surely have heard some rumours yourself. I am willing, I am most anxious,’ says the Rector, with growing earnestness, ‘to hear the truth of a story that seems, as it now stands, to be disastrous to two people. You, Wyndham, are one of them. No, not a word. Hear me first. I want to say just this: that if I was a little harsh to you a moment ago, it was because of Susan. One’s daughter has the first claim. And she—that child—to be—You tell me you did not take her to see—’ ‘I told you that,’ says Wyndham, ‘and I told you, too’—very straightly—‘that if I had done so I should see no reason why I should be ashamed of it. However, I had nothing to do with your daughter’s visit to Miss Moore. It appears Miss Moore asked her to come into my—her—’ The Rector stops him with an impatient gesture. ‘Whose is it, yours or hers?’ asks he. ‘Mine, yet hers in a sense, too,’ begins and ends the fluent lawyer, whose fluency has now, at his need, deserted him. ‘I do not understand your evasions.’ ‘If you will let me—’ ‘I want no explanations,’ says the Rector coldly. ‘I want only one answer to one plain question: Who is this Miss Moore?’ He looks straight at Wyndham. The extenuating circumstances he had believed in grow smaller and smaller. Wyndham hesitates. Who is she, indeed? Who is this tenant of his? ‘You hesitate, I see,’ says Mr. Barry. ‘You have the grace to do even so much. But at all events you cannot deny that you permitted the presence of my young daughter in that place beyond.’ ‘I—’