“If I had,” he said, “in one sense I should have done you no wrong.  All this would be nothing to the world which would read these poems.  But when I knew that it made all the difference to you—­”

She turned, as he had seen her turn once and only Once before, in reproach that was almost anger.

“To me?  Do you suppose I’m thinking of myself?”

“Perhaps not.  That doesn’t prevent my thinking of you.  But I was thinking of myself, too.  Supposing I had done this thing that you would have loathed; even though you had never known it, I should have felt that I had betrayed your trust, that I had taken something from you that I had no right to take, something that you would never have given me if you had known.  What was I to do?”

She did not answer him.  Once before, he remembered, when his honour was in difficulties, she had refused to help it out, left it to struggle to the light; which was what it did now.

“It would have been better to have said nothing and done nothing.”

He expected her to close instantly with that view of his behaviour which honour had presented as the final one, but this she did not do.

“If you had said nothing you might have done what you liked.”

“I see.  It’s my saying it that makes the difference?”

“That is not what I meant.  I meant that you were free to publish what you have written.  You are not free to say these things to me.”

“For the life of me I don’t know why I said them.  It means perdition for my poems and for me.  I knew that was all I had to gain by telling you the truth.”

“But it isn’t the truth.  You know it isn’t.  You don’t even think it is.”

“And if it were, would it be so terrible to you to hear it?”

She did not answer.  She only looked at him, as if by looking she could read the truth.  For his face had never lied.

He persisted.  “If it were true, what would you think of me?”

“I should think it most dishonourable of you to say so.  But it isn’t true.”

He smiled.  “Therefore it can’t be dishonourable of me to say so.”

“No, not that.  You are not dishonourable; therefore it can’t be true.  Let us forget that you ever said it.”

“But I can’t forget that it’s true any more than I can make it untrue.  You think me dishonourable, because you think I’ve changed.  But I haven’t changed.  It always was so, ever since I knew you; and that’s more than five years ago now.  I am dishonourable; but that’s not where the dishonour comes in. The dishonourable thing would have been to have left off caring for you.  But I never did leave off.  There never was a minute when it wasn’t true, nor a minute when I didn’t think it.  If I was sure of nothing else I was always sure of that.  Where the dishonour came in was in caring for another woman, in another way.”