“We never make so colossal a mistake as when we imagine that we know ourselves.  Months ago, when your husband first proposed this scheme to me, I was, according to my own conception, a solitary being vastly ill-used by Fate, who, with a fine stoicism, was leading a clean life.  That was what I believed; but there, at the very outset, I deceived myself.  I was simply a man who shut himself up because he cherished a grudge against life, and who lived honestly because he had a constitutional distaste for vice.  My first feeling when I saw your husband was one of self-righteous contempt, and that has been my attitude all along.  I have often marvelled at the flood of intolerance that has rushed over me at sight of him—­the violent desire that has possessed me to look away from his weakness and banish the knowledge of it; but now I understand.

“I know now what the feeling meant.  The knowledge came to me to-night.  It meant that I turned away from his weakness because deep within myself something stirred in recognition of it.  Humanity is really much simpler than we like to think, and human impulses have an extraordinary fundamental connection.  Weakness is egotism—­but so is strength.  Chilcote has followed his vice; I have followed my ambition.  It will take a higher judgment than yours or mine to say which of us has been the more selfish man.”  He paused and looked at her.

She was watching him intently.  Some of the meaning in his face had found a pained, alarmed reflection in her own.  But the awe and wonder of the morning’s discovery still colored her mind too vividly to allow of other considerations possessing their proper value.  The thrill of exultation with which the misgivings born of Chilcote’s vice had dropped away from her mental image of Loder was still too absorbing to be easily dominated.  She loved, and as if by a miracle her love had been justified!  For the moment the justification was all-sufficing.  Something of confidence—­something of the innocence that comes not from ignorance of evil but from a mind singularly uncontaminated—­blinded her to the danger of her position.

Loder, waiting apprehensively for some aid, some expression of opinion, became gradually conscious of this lack of realization.  Moved by a fresh impulse, he crossed the small space that divided them and caught her hands.

“Eve,” he said, gently, “I have been trying to analyze myself and give you the results; but I sha’n’t try any more; I shall be quite plain with you.

“From the first moment I took your husband’s place I was ambitious.  You unconsciously aroused the feeling when you brought me Fraide’s message on the first night.  You aroused it by your words—­but more strongly, though more obscurely, by your underlying antagonism.  On that night, though I did not know it, I took up my position—­I made my determination.  Do you know what that determination was?”

She shook her head.