For a long while he sat on, motionless, unable to move. Doubt leapt in on him, engulfed him: blackness--such as he had never known before--was upon his soul. Not Davidina--no, not Davidina herself, whom he had now to expect by the late train--had ever dealt him so devastating a blow. ‘Now I know you take your cold bath: I thought you didn’t.’ O pellucid Eve: O rib of Adam, how naked hast thou made the man for whom thou wast formed! And this without in the least intending it, or knowing what she had done. It was true that, even now, she had not found him out; but she had revealed to him with fatal clearness the fact that the shirking of a cold bath and the wearing of a yellow halo were incompatible. And this was the worst thing she had against him, this trivial doubt; but it was enough. Down came his castle. A horrid blush went over him--down even into his clothes; it went farther, had he only known. ‘Thou, Lord, seest me!’ he said to himself, got up, and went swiftly out into the starlit dusk carrying a red light. And then the thought of Davidina, coming on the top of this, struck him cold. He remembered that he had upon him a letter from her which he had not yet read; opening it, he drew out the contents. There was no need to go indoors to get a light; that which he had was sufficient. The letter was very brief and to the point. ‘Found you out! but no matter: you did the honest thing with your eyes open--for once.’ Enclosed was an old envelope, cut open across the top, still bearing its seal, addressed to Davidina in Uncle Phineas’s handwriting. Minutely examining the seal, he found--what Davidina also had found--traces of his own handiwork, a scar showing where it had been removed and put on again. ‘Idiot!’ he said to himself--why hadn’t he covered up the breakage with a larger seal? Or why, again, after all those years had he troubled to tell a lie about it? But the reason for that he knew; it was so that he might stand well--better than he had ever stood before--in Davidina’s eyes. Just that once, so simply, so easily, by so slight a departure from the truth--he had got the better of her; and now her clutch was upon him again. She was coming through the dark night; he must meet her face to face, and hear her asking in hard matter-of-fact tone: ‘Well, what’s the matter now?’