She sank exhausted again onto the sofa.  Why had he come?  Why could he not leave her alone?  Did she want his friendship, his pity, his confidence?  Why look at her so kindly when he must know how he hurt her?  She had felt such joy when she saw that he believed in her.  The idea that she was still innocent and unblemished in his eyes was just for the moment an unutterable relief.  An unutterable relief, too, it had felt at the moment, to be able to accept his defence of himself.  That he was still lovable, and that he had no dark thoughts of her, had been such joy, but only a passing joy.  Had he not told her in horribly plain speech that he loved Lady Rose, and would love her to the end?  All this, which was so vital to Molly, was but an episode in a friendship that was a detail in his life!

But now, alone, trying to see clearly through the confusion, how unbearable it had been to hear him say, “That you with your youth and your innocence and your candour....”  He had thought it too horrible to suspect her, and by that confidence he made her load of guilt almost unendurable.

She could not go on like this, could not live like this.  The silence was far more unbearable now that a human voice had broken into it, a voice she loved repudiating with indignant scorn the possibility of suspecting her!  She must go somewhere, she must speak to some one.  But at this moment it was also evident that she must dress for dinner.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE RELIEF OF SPEECH

There is quite commonly a peculiar glow of sunshine just before a storm, a brightness so obviously unreliable that we are torn between enjoyment and anxiety.  I have known no greater revelation of Nature’s glories, even in a sunset hour, than in one of these moments of glow before the darkness of storm.  And in a man’s life there is sometimes an episode so bright, so full of promise, that we feel its perfection to be the measure of its instability.

Such a moment had come to Mark Molyneux.  The time of depression and trial, the time when a vague sense of danger and a vague sense of aspiration had made him turn his eyes towards the cloister, had ended in his taking his work more and more earnestly and becoming surprisingly successful in his dealings with both rich and poor.

It seemed during the past winter that Mark would carry all before him; he had come into close contact with the poor, and in the circle in which his personal influence could be felt there was a real movement of religious earnestness and moral reform.  There was a noticeable glow of zeal in the other curates and in the parish workers, who, with one or two exceptions, were enthusiastic in their devotion to him personally and to his notions of work.  Even after Easter several of the recently-cured drunkards were persevering, and other notoriously bad characters seemed determined to show that the first shoots of their awakened moral life were not merely what gardeners call “flowering shoots,” but steady growths giving promise of sound wood.