‘You met her on Wednesday night in that week,’ Gilbert said, speaking with uncertain voice.  ’The night that you saw me and said you had been to Bunce.’

‘Do you know of that from some spy, her enemy and mine—­or how?’

‘I know it.  I can’t tell you how.’

’Yes, I met her that night.  Not by appointment, as you suppose.  It was by mere chance, as I came away from Bunce’s house.  I told her I was leaving town next day, and I said good-bye to her.  Again, not a syllable was uttered that any one might not have heard.’

‘Were you coming away from her, then, when I saw you?’ Gilbert asked, in a hard voice.

‘No, not straight from her.’

As is wont to be the case with us when we have recourse to equivocation, Egremont thought that he read in his rival’s countenance a scornful surmise of the truth.  As is also wont to happen, this sense of detection heated his blood, and for a moment he could have found pleasure in flinging out an angry defiance.  But as he looked Grail in the face, the latter’s eyes fell, and something, some slight movement of feature, touching once more Walter’s sense of compassion, shamed him from unworthy utterance.  He said, in a lower voice: 

’If I had yielded to temptation, if I had so far lost control of myself as to speak a word to her which at once and for ever altered our relations, do you think I should have tried to keep secret what had happened?  Do you think I could have conceived a desire which had her suffering for its end?  Are you so embittered that you can imagine of me nothing better than that?  You think I could have made her my victim?’

Grail read his face.  The emphasis of this speech was deliberate, could not be misunderstood.  For the first time Gilbert turned and moved a little apart.

Walter had not the exclusive privilege of being an idealist.  When at length he spoke out of his deepest feeling, when he revealed, though but indirectly, the meaning of his agitation, of his evasions, and doubtful behaviour, he had found the way of convincing his hearer.  It was a new blow to Gilbert, but it put an end to his darkest fears and to the misery of his misjudgment.  In the silence that followed all the details of the story passed before him with a new significance.  The greatness of his own love—­a love which drew into its service every noblest element of his nature, enabled him, once the obscuring mists dispelled, to interpret his rival’s mind with justice.  Regarding Egremont again, he could read aright the signs of suffering that were on his face.  It was with a strange bitter joy that he recovered his faith in the man who had been so much to him.  Yet his first words seemed to express more of passionate resentment than any he had yet spoken.

‘Then you acted wrongly!’ he exclaimed, in a firm, clear voice.  ’You were wrong in allowing her to stay and help you in the library.  You were wrong in speaking to her as you did, in asking her to address you as an equal, and to let you be her friend.  You must have known then what your real meaning was.  It is only half a truth that you said and did nothing to disturb her mind.  You were not honest with yourself, and you had no just regard for me.  You did yield to temptation, and all you have said in defence of yourself has only been true in sound.’