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‘I see.’ She forced her lips to speak, but could not force them to speak without a horrible irony; her astonishment, her panic, were like a tempest shaking her. ‘I see. After such confidences, such forgivenesses asked and granted, it was natural that I should feel something very strange in you; as I did; and in her;—when you first brought her. That explains everything, really.’

Clive was silent for a moment, taking full cognizance of her intention. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not in the sense you mean. To think in the way that you are thinking, where Hester is concerned, would be an impossibility to anyone who loves her. I was not writhing with male jealousy. I was not feeling her damaged goods;—as little as she was herself. That is precisely what you do mean, isn’t it?’—Yes.

He was looking at her with hatred. She felt it flowing into her as if every vein were an inlet for a deadly poison.—‘If I was strange,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t only because of those sad things in her life and because I knew that you would feel as you do feel, if we were to tell you of them. It was because Hester and I had faced things you never dreamed of; horrible things; I in the war; she in Russia. We weren’t ordinary happy young engaged people. I had seen suffering that had nearly turned my