Only by a painful effort could she remind herself that the ideal which had grown so slowly was now defaced.  He loved her, but it was not the love of an honest man.  After all, she had no need to peruse this writing of his; she remembered so well how it had impressed her when she read it on its first appearance, how her father had spoken of it.  Buckland’s manifold evidence was irresistible.  Why should Peak have concealed his authorship?  Why had he disappeared from among the people who thoroughly knew him?

She had loved a dream.  What a task would it be to distinguish between those parts of Peak’s conversation which represented his real thoughts, and those which were mockery of his listeners!  The plan of a retired life which he had sketched to her—­was it all falsehood?  Impossible, for his love was inextricably blended with the details.  Did he imagine that the secret of his unbelief could be preserved for a lifetime, and that it would have no effect whatever upon his happiness as a man?  This seemed a likely reading of the problem.  But what a multitude of moral and intellectual obscurities remained!  The character which had seemed to her nobly simple was become a dark and dread enigma.

She knew so little of his life.  If only it could all be laid bare to her, the secret of his position would be revealed.  Buckland’s violence altogether missed its mark; the dishonour of such a man as Godwin Peak was due to no gross incentive.

It was probable that, in talk with her father, he had been guilty of more deliberate misrepresentation than had marked his intercourse with the rest of the family.  Her father, she felt sure, had come to regard him as a valuable source of argument in the battle against materialism.  Doubtless the German book, which Peak was translating, bore upon that debate, and consequently was used as an aid to dissimulation.  Thinking of this, she all but shared her brother’s vehement feeling.  It pained her to the inmost heart that her father’s generous and candid nature should thus have been played upon.  The deceit, as it concerned herself alone, she could forgive; at least she could suspend judgment until the accused had offered his defence—­feeling that the psychology of the case must till then be beyond her powers of analysis.  But the wrong done to her father revolted her.

A tap at the door caused her to rise, trembling.  She remembered that by this time her mother must be aware of the extraordinary disclosure, and that a new scene of wretched agitation had to be gone through.

‘Sidwell!’

It was Mrs. Warricombe’s voice, and the door opened.

’Sidwell!—­What does all this mean?  I don’t understand half that Buckland has been telling me.’

The speaker’s face was mottled, and she stood panting, a hand pressed against her side.

’How very, very imprudent we have been!  How wrong of father not to have made inquiries!  To think that such a man should have sat at our table!’