He moved to the fireplace, and stood with his back to her. She began to sob. And that he found unendurable. He at last looked round at her, expecting to see her with her head bowed; but she was weeping openly, with her eyes on him; and as she saw him look, she made a motion, like some terrified, lost child, with her hands towards him, half rose, took a single step, and then fell to her knees. There came to Charles then a sharp revulsion—not against her, but against the situation: his half-truths, his hiding of the essential. Perhaps the closest analogy is to what a surgeon sometimes feels before a particularly terrible battle or accident casualty; a savage determination—for what else can be done?—to get on with the operation. To tell the truth. He waited until a moment came without sobs.

“I wished to spare you. But yes—something has happened.”

Very slowly she got to her feet and raised her hands to her cheeks, never for a moment quitting him with her eyes.

“Who?”

“You do not know her. Her name is unimportant.”

“And she… you…”

He looked away.

“I have known her many years. I thought the attachment was broken. I discovered in London… that it is not.”

“You love her?”

“Love? I don’t know… whatever it is that makes it impossible to offer one’s heart freely to another.”

“Why did you not tell me this at the beginning?”

There was a long pause. He could not bear her eyes, which seemed to penetrate every lie he told.

He muttered, “I hoped to spare you the pain of it.”

“Or yourself the shame of it? You… you are a monster!”

She fell back into her chair, staring at him with dilated eyes. Then she flung her face into her hands. He let her weep, and stared fiercely at a china sheep on the mantelpiece; and never till the day he died saw a china sheep again without a hot flush of self-disgust. When at last she spoke, it was with such force that he flinched.

“If I do not kill myself, shame will!”

“I am not worth a moment’s regret. You will meet other men… not broken by life. Honorable men, who will…” he halted, then burst out, “By all you hold sacred, promise never to say that again!”

She stared fiercely at him. “Did you think I should pardon you?” He mutely shook his head. “My parents, my friends—what am I to tell them? That Mr. Charles Smithson has decided after all that his mistress is more important than his honor, his promise, his…”

There was the sound of torn paper. Without looking round he knew that she had vented her anger on her father’s letter.

“I believed her gone forever from my life. Extraordinary circumstances…”

A silence: as if she considered whether she could throw vitriol at him. Her voice was suddenly cold and venomous.

“You have broken your promise. There is a remedy for members of my sex.”

“You have every right to bring such an action. I could only plead guilty.”

“The world shall know you for what you are. That is all I care about.”

“The world will know, whatever happens.”

The enormity of what he had done flooded back through her. She kept shaking her head. He went and took a chair and sat facing her, too far to touch, but close enough to appeal to her better self.

“Can you suppose for one serious moment that I am unpunished? That this has not been the most terrible decision of my life? This hour the most dreaded? The one I shall remember with the deepest remorse till the day I die? I may be—very well, I am a deceiver. But you know I am not heartless. I should not be here now if I were. I should have written a letter, fled abroad—”

“I wish you had.”

He gave the crown of her head a long look, then stood. He caught sight of himself in a mirror; and the man in the mirror, Charles in another world, seemed the true self. The one in the room was what she said, an impostor; had always been, in his relations with Ernestina, an impostor, an observed other. He went at last into one of his prepared speeches.

“I cannot expect you to feel anything but anger and resentment. All I ask is that when these… natural feelings have diminished you will recall that no condemnation of my conduct can approach the severity of my own… and that my one excuse is my incapacity longer to deceive a person whom I have learned to respect and admire.”

It sounded false; it was false; and Charles was uncomfortably aware of her unpent contempt for him.

“I am trying to picture her. I suppose she is titled—has pretensions to birth. Oh… if I had only listened to my poor, dear father!”

“What does that mean?”

“He knows the nobility. He has a phrase for them—Fine manners and unpaid bills.”

“I am not a member of the nobility.”

“You are like your uncle. You behave as if your rank excuses you all concern with what we ordinary creatures of the world believe in. And so does she. What woman could be so vile as to make a man break his vows? I can guess.” She spat the guess out. “She is married.”

“I will not discuss this.”

“Where is she now? In London?”

He stared at Ernestine a moment, then turned on his heel and walked towards the door. She stood.

“My father will drag your name, both your names, through the mire. You will be spurned and detested by all who know you. You will be hounded out of England, you will be—”

He had halted at the door. Now he opened it. And that—or the impossibility of thinking of a sufficient infamy for him—made her stop. Her face was working, as if she wanted to say so much more, but could not. She swayed; and then some contradictory self in her said his name; as if it had been a nightmare, and now she wished to be told she was waking from it.

He did not move. She faltered and then abruptly slumped to the floor by her chair. His first instinctive move was to go to her. But something in the way she had fallen, the rather too careful way her knees had crumpled and her body slipped sideways onto the carpet, stopped him.

He stared a moment down at that collapsed figure, and recognized the catatonia of convention.

He said, “I shall write at once to your father.”

She made no sign, but lay with her eyes closed, her hand pathetically extended on the carpet. He strode to the bellrope beside the mantelpiece and pulled it sharply, then strode back to the open door. As soon as he heard Mary’s footsteps, he left the room. The maid came running up the stairs from the kitchen. Charles indicated the sitting room.

“She has had a shock. You must on no account leave her. I go to fetch Doctor Grogan.” Mary herself looked for a moment as if she might faint. She put her hand on the banister rail and stared at Charles with stricken eyes. “You understand. On no account leave her.” She nodded and bobbed, but did not move. “She has merely fainted. Loosen her dress.”

With one more terrified look at him, the maid went into the room. Charles waited a few seconds more. He heard a faint moan, then Mary’s voice.

“Oh miss, miss, ‘tis Mary. The doctor’s comin’, miss. ‘Tis all right, miss, I woan’ leave ee.”

And Charles for a brief moment stepped back into the room. He saw Mary on her knees, cradling Ernestina up. The mistress’s face was turned against the maid’s breast. Mary looked up at Charles: those vivid eyes seemed to forbid him to watch or remain. He accepted their candid judgment.