Sidwell was made uneasy by the course upon which she had entered.  To what did her words tend?  If only to a demonstration that fate had used him as the plaything of its irony—­if, after all, she had nothing to say to him but ‘See how your own folly has ruined you’, then she had better have kept silence.  She not only appeared to be offering him encouragement, but was in truth doing so.  She wished him to understand that his way of thinking was no obstacle to her love, and with that purpose she was even guilty of a slight misrepresentation.  For it was only since the shock of this disaster that she had clearly recognised the change in her own mind.  True, the regret of which she spoke had for an instant visited her, but it represented a mundane solicitude rather than an intellectual scruple.  It had occurred to her how much brighter would be their prospect if Peak were but an active man of the world, with a career before him distinctly suited to his powers.

His contention was undeniably just.  The influence to which she had from the first submitted was the same that her father felt so strongly.  Godwin interested her as a self-reliant champion of the old faiths, and his personal characteristics would never have awakened such sympathy in her but for that initial recommendation.  Natural prejudice would have prevented her from perceiving the points of kindred between his temperament and her own.  His low origin, the ridiculous stories connected with his youth—­why had she, in spite of likelihood, been able to disregard these things?  Only because of what she then deemed his spiritual value.

But for the dishonourable part he had played, this bond of love would never have been formed between them.  The thought was a new apology for his transgression; she could not but defy her conscience, and look indulgently on the evil which had borne such fruit.

Godwin had begun to speak again.

’This is quite in keeping with the tenor of my whole life.  Whatever I undertake ends in frustration at a point where success seems to have just come within my reach.  Great things and trifles—­it’s all the same.  My course at College was broken off at the moment when I might have assured my future.  Later, I made many an effort to succeed in literature, and when at length something of mine was printed in a leading review, I could not even sign it, and had no profit from the attention it excited.  Now—­well, you see.  Laughable, isn’t it?’

Sidwell scarcely withheld herself from bending forward and giving him her hand.

‘What shall you do?’ she asked.

’Oh, I am not afraid.  I have still enough money left to support me until I can find some occupation of the old kind.  Fortunately, I am not one of those men whose brains have no marketable value.’

‘If you knew how it pains me to hear you!’

’If I didn’t believe that, I couldn’t speak to you like this.  I never thought you would let me see you again, and if you hadn’t asked me to come, I could never have brought myself to face you.  But it would have been a miserable thing to go off without even knowing what you thought of me.’