The horror of his position returned upon him, the burden of his knowledge and her ignorance.  If only she knew, if only he could go to her and tell her everything, all that he knew and all that he guessed!  He was still firm in his conviction that he had no moral right to his knowledge; it was a thing he almost seemed to have come by dishonestly.  If Miss Harden knew nothing of her father’s affairs, it was to be presumed that they had been purposely kept from her to save her pain.  He had no right to tell her.

No matter, he would tell her, he would tell her this morning, and having told her, he would go away.

He got up and paced to and fro again.  He stood before the open window till he had chilled himself through; then he came back and cowered over the fire.  A white thing lay by the hearth at his feet, it was Lucia Harden’s shawl, lying crumpled where he had thrown it.  It was the sign and symbol of her presence there.  It was also the proof of it.

How would she feel if she knew that he had been aware of it all the time?  The fact remained that she had risked his waking; there was comfort for him in that.  She had always been kind to him, and he had never had even a momentary illusion as to the source and the nature of her kindness.  He had taken it, as he had taken her extreme courtesy, for the measure of the distance that divided them.  It showed her secure in her detachment, her freedom from any intimate thought of him, from any thought of him at all.  But in this last act of kindness it could hardly be that she had not taken him into consideration.  She could hardly have been pleased if she knew he had been awake, yet she had risked his waking.  Before she risked it she must have credited him with something of her own simplicity of soul.

And this was how he had repaid her.

He saw her as she had knelt by him, mending the dying fire, as she had stood looking at him, as she had stooped over him to cover him, and as she had turned away; and he saw himself, sinning as he had sinned against her in his heart.

He knew perfectly well that the average man would have felt no compunction whatever upon this head.  To the average man his imagination (if he has any) is an unreal thing; to Rickman it was the most real thing about him.  It was so young, and in its youth so ungovernably creative, that it flung out its ideas, as it were, alive and kicking.  It was only partially true of him that his dream was divorced from reality.  For with him the phantoms of the mind (which to the average man are merely phantoms), projected themselves with a bodily vividness and violence.  Not only had they the colour and authority of accomplished fact, they were invested with an immortality denied to facts.  His imagination was in this so far spiritual that it perceived desire to be the eternal soul of the deed, and the deed to be but the perishing body of desire.  From this point of view, conduct may figure as comparatively unimportant; therefore this point of view is very properly avoided by the average man.