He had not known that he loved Sheila until Mrs. Caldwell told him that he should have married her; but those words had been for him a revelation; an illumination of the last ten years and more. Suddenly he saw, as if a searchlight had been flung upon them, the innermost, secret depths of his own heart--saw them filled with the image of another man's wife. So swiftly, so entirely without warning had self-knowledge dawned upon him that the cry had been wrung from him, "Why do you tell me this now--when it is too late?" But after the one betraying exclamation, he had put all his strength into the attempt to conceal his discovery. Mrs. Caldwell had spoken of the honor of her generation as of a thing that had not survived, in its purity, to a later one. Yet Peter's sense of honor was too scrupulous to permit him the confession to anyone that he loved another's wife. To the single end of concealment he had set himself through the rest of that interview. He had gone through it as through some nerve-racking nightmare, struggling for self-control as one struggles for safety in dreams of horrid peril. He must not admit that he loved Sheila! He must not admit that he loved her! That was what he had told himself over and over, fighting all the while for the mastery of his face, his voice, lest they proclaim what his lips did not utter. Yet in spite of the struggle, in spite of the sense of awful calamity, of absolute wreckage, that had descended upon him, he had been keenly, piteously conscious of every word that Mrs. Caldwell had said; and he had realized fully the impossibility and the irony of the task she had imposed upon him. Having failed to marry Sheila himself, he must now undertake to keep her in love with the man who had married her! This was all which was required of him; this was _all_! His devotion to Mrs. Caldwell had not faltered; but now, facing his tragedy alone and in the freedom to suffer, he felt a great bitterness toward his old friend for her request. It seemed to him incredibly stupid that she should think for an instant that he, an unmarried man, could assume the post of guardian over a wife's love for her husband. It implied, in the first place, an intimacy which Sheila was far too fine-grained to permit; for however confidential she might become on the subject of her work, she would never be confidential with him in regard to Ted. Whatever he might perceive, she would never give him the opportunity to say to her, "I think that your affection for your husband is waning. Let us put fresh fuel on the fire." It implied, too, that request of Mrs. Caldwell's, a sharing of Sheila's life which Shadyville would never tolerate; which his own awakened heart could not tolerate. He could not be much with Sheila henceforth. For once, Shadyville's narrow restrictions would be right. So, he told himself, Mrs. Caldwell had been stupid. And--unconsciously, of course--she had been cruel.