in her cloak and hat, bending forward a little, the hectic flush of strong excitement colouring her checks, that were already branded by her malady—­when he underwent a moral revolution.  He had no more to learn.  He glanced at Lightmark curiously, almost impartially, his loathing strangely tempered by a sort of self-contempt, that he should have been so deluded.  The clumsy lies which this man had told him, and which he in his indolent charity had believed!  All at once, and finally, in a flash of brutal illumination, he saw Lightmark, who had once been his friend, as he really was, naked and unclean.  It stripped him of all his superficial qualities; the mask of genial good-nature, the air of good-fellowship, under which his gross egoism lay concealed that it might be more securely mischievous when it went loose.  His amiability was an imposture, a dangerous harlequinade; the man was bad.  It was a plausible scoundrel, a vulgar profligate with a handsome face and a few cheap talents—­had he not been reduced to stealing the picture of his friend?—­whom these two women had loved, to whom one of them was married.  Ah, the sting of it lay there!  Good or bad, he was Eve’s husband, and she was his wife, bound to him until the end.  And then, for the first time, seeing her there, helpless and terrified, in her forlorn prettiness, he deceived himself no longer, wrapped up his tenderness for the woman, his angry pity for her misery that was coming, in no false terms.  Such self-deception, honest as it had been, was no longer possible.  He knew now that he loved her, and all that his love had been—­the very salt and savour of life to him, the one delicious and adorable pain relieving the gray ennui of the rest of it, to remain with him always (even, as it seemed now, in the very article of death) as a reminder of the intolerable sweetness which life, under other conditions, might have contained.  And inexplicably, in the midst of his desolation, his heart sang a sort of fierce paean:  as a woman, delivered of a man-child, goes triumphing to meet the sordidness of death, so was there in Rainham’s rapid acceptance of his fruitless and ineffectual love a distinct sense of victory, in which pain expired—­victory over the meanness and triviality of modern life, which could never seem quite mean and trivial again, since he had proved it to be capable of such moments; had looked once—­and could so sing his “Nunc Dimittis”—­upon the face of love.  And it all happened in a second, and in a further second—­for his thought, quickened by the emergency, still leapt forward with incredible swiftness—­a great audacity seized Philip Rainham, to save the beloved woman pain.  The devil would be at him later, would beset him, harass him, madden him with hint and opportunity of profiting by Lightmark’s forfeiture.  But the devil’s turn was not yet; he was filled only with his great and reverent love, his sublime pity for the little tragical figure in front of him, whose house of painted cards tumbled.  Well! he might save it for her for a little longer—­at least, there was one desperate chance which he would try.