The nature of the crime was such that there was no possibility or explanation or defence against the accuser whose condemnation weighed heaviest on her soul.  He loomed before her, hovered over her, with the tubes of the heart-probing stethoscope in his ears (as a matter of fact they gave him a somewhat grotesque appearance, remotely suggestive of a Hindoo idol; but Miss Quincey had not noticed that); his bumpy forehead was terrible with intelligence; his eyes were cold and comprehensive; the smile of a foregone conclusion flickered on his lips.

He must have known it all the time.  There never had been any misunderstanding.  That was the clue to his conduct; that was the reason why he had left off coming to the house; for he was the soul of delicacy and honour.  And yet she had never said a word that might be interpreted—­He must have seen it in her face, then,—­that day—­when she allowed herself to sit with him in the park.  She remembered—­things that he had said to her—­did they mean that he had seen?  She saw it all as he had seen it.  “Delicacy” and “honour” indeed!  Disgust and contempt would be more likely feelings.

She lay awake all Saturday night and all Sunday night, until four o’clock on Monday morning; always reviewing the situation, always going over the same patch of ground in the desperate hope of finding some place where her self-respect could rest, and discovering nothing but the traces of her guilty feet.  A subtler woman would have flourished lightly over the territory, till she had whisked away every vestige of her trail; another would have seen the humour of the situation and blown the whole thing into the inane with a burst of healthy laughter; but subtlety and humour were not Miss Quincey’s strong points.  She could do nothing but creep shivering to bed and lie there, face to face with her own enormity.

On Monday morning and on many mornings after she crept out into the street stealthily, like a criminal seeking some shelter where she could hide her head.  She acquired a habit—­odd enough to the casual onlooker—­of slinking cautiously round every turning and rushing every crossing in her abject terror of meeting Bastian Cautley.

There was nobody to tell her that it would not matter if she did meet him; no cheerful woman of the world to smile in her frightened face and say:  “My dear Miss Quincey, there is nothing remarkable in this.  We all do it, sooner or later.  Too late?  Not a bit of it; better too late than never, and if it’s that Cautley man I’m sure I don’t wonder.  I’m in love with him myself.  Lost your self-respect, have you?  Self-respect, indeed, why bless your soul, you are all the nicer for it.  As for hiding your head I never heard such rubbish in my life.  Nobody is looking at you—­certainly not the Cautley man.  In fact, to tell you the truth, at this moment he is particularly engaged in looking the other way.”

But Miss Quincey did not know that lady.  She knew no one but Rhoda and Mrs. Moon; and if Mrs. Moon was too old, Rhoda was too young to take that view; besides, Mrs. Moon was not a woman of the world and no ridiculous delicacy prompted her to look the other way.  In any case Juliana’s state of mind, advertised as it was by her complexion and many eccentricities of behaviour, could not have escaped her notice.