Again he pressed her shoulders, kissed her forehead; then stared again at the ceiling. She was so young now, so overwhelmed.

“I must break my engagement.”

“I ask nothing of you. I cannot. I am to blame.”

“You warned me, you warned me. I am wholly to blame. I knew when I came here… I chose to be blind. I put all my obligations behind me.”

She murmured, “I wished it so.” She said it again, sadly. “I wished it so.”

For a while he stroked her hair. It fell over her shoulder, her face, veiling her.

“Sarah… it is the sweetest name.”

She did not answer. A minute passed, his hand smoothing her hair, as if she were a child. But his mind was elsewhere. As if she sensed it, she at last spoke.

“I know you cannot marry me.”

“I must. I wish to. I could never look myself in the face again if I did not.”

“I have been wicked. I have long imagined such a day as this. I am not fit to be your wife.”

“My dearest—”

“Your position in the world, your friends, your… and she—I know she must love you. How should I not know what she feels?”

“But I no longer love her!”

She let his vehemence drain into the silence.

“She is worthy of you. I am not.”

At last he began to take her at her word. He made her turn her head and they looked, in the dim outside light, into each other’s penumbral eyes. His were full of a kind of horror; and hers were calm, faintly smiling.

“You cannot mean I should go away—as if nothing had happened between us?”

She said nothing; yet in her eyes he read her meaning. He raised himself on one elbow.

“You cannot forgive me so much. Or ask so little.”

She sank her head against the pillow, her eyes on some dark future. “Why not, if I love you?”

He strained her to him. The thought of such sacrifice made his eyes smart with tears. The injustice Grogan and he had done her! She was a nobler being than either of them.

Charles was flooded with contempt for his sex: their triviality, their credulity, their selfishness. But he was of that sex, and there came to him some of its old devious cowardice: Could not this perhaps be no more than his last fling, the sowing of the last wild oats? But he no sooner thought that than he felt like a murderer acquitted on some technical flaw in the prosecution case. He might stand a free man outside the court; but eternally guilty in his heart.

“I am infinitely strange to myself.”

“I have felt that too. It is because we have sinned. And we cannot believe we have sinned.” She spoke as if she was staring into an endless night. “All I wish for is your happiness. Now I know there was truly a day upon which you loved me, I can bear… I can bear any thought… except that you should die.”

He raised himself again then, and looked down at her. She had still a faint smile in her eyes, a deep knowing—a spiritual or psychological answer to his physical knowing of her. He had never felt so close, so one with a woman. He bent and kissed her, and out of a much purer love than that which began to reannounce itself, at the passionate contact of her lips, in his loins. Charles was like many Victorian men. He could not really believe that any woman of refined sensibilities could enjoy being a receptacle for male lust. He had already abused her love for him intolerably; it must not happen again. And the time—he could not stay longer! He sat up.

“The person downstairs… and my man is waiting for me at my hotel. I beg you to give me a day or two’s grace. I cannot think what to do now.”

Her eyes were closed. She said, “I am not worthy of you.”

He stared at her a moment, then got off the bed and went into the other room.

And there! A thunderbolt struck him.

In looking down as he dressed he perceived a red stain on the front tails of his shirt. For a moment he thought he must have cut himself; but he had felt no pain. He furtively examined himself. Then he gripped the top of the armchair, staring back at the bedroom door—for he had suddenly realized what a more experienced, or less feverish, lover would have suspected much sooner.

He had forced a virgin.

There was a movement in the room behind him. His head whirling, stunned, yet now in a desperate haste, he pulled on his clothes. There was the sound of water being poured into a basin, a chink of china as a soapdish scraped. She had not given herself to Varguennes. She had lied. All her conduct, all her motives in Lyme Regis had been based on a lie. But for what purpose. Why? Why? Why?

Blackmail!

To put him totally in her power!

And all those loathsome succubi of the male mind, their fat fears of a great feminine conspiracy to suck the virility from their veins, to prey upon their idealism, melt them into wax and mold them to their evil fancies… these, and a surging back to credibility of the hideous evidence adduced in the La Ronciere appeal, filled Charles’s mind with an apocalyptic horror.

The discreet sounds of washing ceased. There were various small rustlings—he supposed she was getting into the bed. Dressed, he stood staring at the fire. She was mad, evil, enlacing him in the strangest of nets… but why?

There was a sound. He turned, his thoughts only too evident on his face. She stood in the doorway, now in her old indigo dress, her hair still loose, yet with something of that old defiance: he remembered for an instant that time he had first come upon her, when she had stood on the ledge over the sea and stared up at him. She must have seen that he had discovered the truth; and once more she forestalled, castrated the accusation in his mind.

She repeated her previous words.

“I am not worthy of you.”

And now, he believed her. He whispered, “Varguennes?”

“When I went to where I told in Weymouth… I was still some way from the door… I saw him come out. With a woman. The kind of woman one cannot mistake.” She avoided his fierce eyes. “I drew into a doorway. When they had gone, I walked away.”

“But why did you tell—”

She moved abruptly to the window; and he was silenced. She had no limp. There was no strained ankle. She glanced at his freshly accusing look, then turned her back.

“Yes. I have deceived you. But I shall not trouble you again.”

“But what have I… why should you…”

A swarm of mysteries.

She faced him. It had begun to rain heavily again. Her eyes were unflinching, her old defiance returned; and yet now it lay behind something gentler, a reminder to him that he had just possessed her. The old distance, but a softer distance.

“You have given me the consolation of believing that in another world, another age, another life, I might have been your wife. You have given me the strength to go on living… in the here and now.” Less than ten feet lay between them; and yet it seemed like ten miles. “There is one thing in which I have not deceived you. I loved you… I think from the moment I saw you. In that, you were never deceived. What duped you was my loneliness. A resentment, an envy, I don’t know. I don’t know.” She turned again to the window and the rain. “Do not ask me to explain what I have done. I cannot explain it. It is not to be explained.”

Charles stared in the fraught silence at her back. As he had so shortly before felt swept towards her, now he felt swept away—and in both cases, she was to blame. “I cannot accept that. It must be explained.” But she shook her head. “Please go now. I pray for your happiness. I shall never disturb it again.”

He did not move. After a moment or two she looked round at him, and evidently read, as she had once before, his secret thought. Her expression was calm, almost fatalistic.

“It is as I told you before. I am far stronger than any man may easily imagine. My life will end when nature ends it.”

He bore the sight of her a few seconds more, then turned towards his hat and stick.