And yet it was of course immeasurably worse!  Such is the “bubble reputation”—­the difference between the known and the unknown.

At nine o’clock a note was brought to his room: 

     “Will you breakfast with me in half an hour?  You will find me
     alone.

     “E.M.”

Before the clock struck the half-hour, Elizabeth was already waiting for her guest, listening for every sound.  She too had been awake half the night.

When he came in she went up to him, with her quick-tripping step, holding out both her hands; and he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

“I am so—­so sorry!” was all she could say.  He looked into her eyes, and as her hands lay in his he stooped suddenly and kissed them.  There was a great piteousness in his expression, and she felt through every nerve the humiliation and the moral weariness which oppressed him.  Suddenly she recalled that first moment of intimacy between them when he had so brusquely warned her about Philip, and she had been wounded by his mere strength and fearlessness; and it hurt her to realise the contrast between that strength and this weakness.

She made him sit down beside her in the broad window of her little sitting-room, which over-looked the winding valley with the famous loops of the descending railway, and the moving light and shade on the forest; and very gently and tenderly she made him tell her all the story from first to last.

His shrinking passed away, soothed by her sweetness, her restrained emotion, and after a little he talked with freedom, gradually recovering his normal steadiness and clearness of mind.

At the same time she perceived some great change in him.  The hidden spring of melancholy in his nature, which, amid all his practical energies and activities, she had always discerned, seemed to have overleaped its barriers, and to be invading the landmarks of character.

At the end of his narrative he said something in a hurried, low voice which gave her a clue.

“I did what I could to help him—­but my father hated me.  He died hating me.  Nothing I could do altered him.  Had he reason?  When my brother and I in our anger thought we were avenging our mother’s death, were we in truth destroying him also—­driving him into wickedness beyond hope?  Were we—­was I—­for I was the eldest—­responsible?  Does his death, moral and physical, lie at my door?”

He raised his eyes to her—­his tired appealing eyes—­and Elizabeth realised sharply how deep a hold such questionings take on such a man.  She tried to argue with and comfort him—­and he seemed to absorb, to listen—­but in the middle of it, he said abruptly, as though to change the subject: 

“And I confess the publicity has hit me hard.  It may be cowardly, but I can’t face it for a while.  I think I told you I owned some land in Saskatchewan.  I shall go and settle down on it at once.”