So he stood before the truth; and it filled his heart with some agony and some light.  Examining his love in this revelation, he discovered strange things; and first, that it was love only that had opened his eyes and enabled him to solve the secret at all.  Nobody had made the discovery but himself, and he, of all men the least likely to come at any concern others desired to hide from him, had fathomed this great fact, had won it from the heart of unconscious Chris. His love widened and deepened into profound pity as he thought of all that her secret and the preservation of it must have meant; and tears dimmed his eyes as he pictured her life since her lover’s passing.

To him the discovery hurt Chris so little that for a time he underrated the effect of it upon other people.  His affection rose clean above the unhappy fact, and it was some time before he began to appreciate the spectacle of Chris under the world’s eye with the truth no longer hidden.  Then a sense of his own helplessness overmastered him; he walked slowly, drew up at a gate and stood motionless, leaning over it.  So silent did he stand, and so long, that a stoat hopped across the road within two yards of him.

He realised to the full that he was absolutely powerless.  Chris alone must disperse the rumours fastening on her brother if they were to be dispersed.  He knew that she would not suffer any great cloud of unjust censure to rest upon Will, and he saw what a bitter problem must be overwhelming her.  Nobody could help her and he, who knew, was as powerless as the rest.  Then he asked himself if that last conviction was true.  He probed the secret places of his mind to find an idea; he prayed for some chance spark or flash of genius to aid him before this trial; he mourned his own simple brains, so weak to aid him in this vital pass.  But of all living men the accidental discovery was most safe with him.  His heart went out to the secret mother, and he told himself that he would guard her mystery like gold.

It was strange in a nature so timorous that not once did a suspicion he had erred overtake him, and presently he wondered to observe how ancient this discovery of the motherhood of Chris had grown within his mind.  It appeared as venerable as his own love for her.  He yearned for power to aid; without conscious direction of his course he proceeded and strode along for hours.  Then he ate a meal of bread and cheese at an inn and tramped forward once more upon a winding road towards the village of Zeal.

Through his uncertainty, athwart the deep perplexity of his mind, moved hope and a shadowed joy.  Within him arose again the vision of happiness once pictured and prayed for, once revived, never quite banished to the grey limbo of ambitions beyond fulfilment.  Now realities saddened the thought of it and brought ambition within a new environment less splendid than the old.  But, despite clouds, hope shone fairly forth at last.  So a planet, that the eye has followed at twilight and then lost a while, beams anew at dawn after lapse of days, and wheels in wide mazes upon some new background of the unchanging stars.