That was Marcella’s way of reading a man’s thoughts.  She did not attribute to Peak the penetration which would make him uneasy.  In spite of masculine proverbs, it is the habit of women to suppose that the other sex regards them confidingly, ingenuously.  Marcella was unusually endowed with analytic intelligence, but in this case she believed what she hoped.  She knew that Peak’s confidence in her must be coloured with contempt, but this mattered little so long as he paid her the compliment of feeling sure that she was superior to ignoble temptations.  Many a woman would behave with treacherous malice.  It was in her power to expose him, to confound all his schemes, for she knew the authorship of that remarkable paper in The Critical Review.  Before receiving Peak’s injunction of secrecy, Earwaker had talked of ‘The New Sophistry’ with Moxey and with Malkin; the request came too late.  In her interview with Godwin at the Exeter hotel, she had not even hinted at this knowledge, partly because she was unconscious that Peak imagined the affair a secret between himself and Earwaker, partly because she thought it unworthy of her even to seem to threaten.  It gratified her, however, to feel that he was at her mercy, and the thought preoccupied her for many days.

Passion which has the intellect on its side is more easily endured than that which offers sensual defiance to all reasoning, but on the other hand it lasts much longer.  Marcella was not consumed by her emotions; she often thought calmly, coldly, of the man she loved.  Yet he was seldom long out of her mind, and the instigation of circumstances at times made her suffering intense.  Such an occasion was her first meeting with Sidwell Warricombe, which took place at the Walworths’, in London.  Down in Devonshire she had learnt that a family named Warricombe were Peak’s intimate friends; nothing more than this, for indeed no one was in a position to tell her more.  Wakeful jealousy caused her to fix upon the fact as one of significance; Godwin’s evasive manner when she questioned him confirmed her suspicions; and as soon as she was brought face to face with Sidwell, suspicion became certainty.  She knew at once that Miss Warricombe was the very person who would be supremely attractive to Godwin Peak.

An interval of weeks, and again she saw the face that in the meantime had been as present to her imagination as Godwin’s own features.  This time she conversed at some length with Miss Warricombe.  Was it merely a fancy that the beautiful woman looked at her, spoke to her, with some exceptional interest?  By now she had learnt that the Moorhouses and the Warricombes were connected in close friendship:  it was all but certain, then, that Miss Moorhouse had told Miss Warricombe of Peak’s visit to Budleigh Salterton, and its incidents.  Could this in any way be explanatory of the steady, searching look in those soft eyes?