There was an instant’s silence.  Then Loder stepped forward.

“You knew—­for four years?” he said, very slowly.  For the first time that night he remembered Chilcote and forgot himself.

Eve lifted her head with a quick gesture—­as if, in flinging off discretion and silence, she appreciated to the full the new relief of speech.

“Yes, I knew.  Perhaps I should have spoken when I first surprised the secret, but it’s all so past that it’s useless to speculate now.  It was fate, I suppose.  I was very young, you were very unapproachable, and—­and we had no love to make the way easy.”  For a second her glance faltered and she looked away.  “A woman’s—­a girl’s—­disillusioning is a very sad comedy—­it should never have an audience.”  She laughed a little bitterly as she looked back again.  “I saw all the deceits, all the subterfuges, all the—­lies.”  She said the word deliberately, meeting his eyes.

Again he thought of Chilcote, but his face paled.

“I saw it all.  I lived with it all till I grew hard and indifferent—­till I acquiesced in your ‘nerves’ as readily as the rest of the world that hadn’t suspected and didn’t know.”  Again she laughed nervously.  “And I thought the indifference would last forever.  If one lives in a groove for years, one gets frozen up; I never felt more frozen than on the night Mr. Fraide spoke to me of you—­asked me to use my influence; then, on that night—­”

“Yes.  On that night?” Loder’s voice was tense.

But her excitement had suddenly fallen.  Whether his glance had quelled it or whether the force of her feelings had worked itself out it was impossible to say, but her eyes had lost their resolution.  She stood hesitating for a moment, then she turned and moved to the mantel-piece.

“That night you found me—­changed?” Loder was insistent.

“Changed—­and yet not changed.”  She spoke reluctantly, with averted head.

“And what did you think?”

Again she was silent; then again a faint excitement tinged her cheeks.

“I thought—­” she began.  “It seemed—­” Once more she paused, hampered by her own uncertainty, her own sense of puzzling incongruity.  “I don’t know why I speak like this,” she went on at last, as if in justification of herself, “or why I want to speak.  But a feeling—­an extraordinary, incomprehensible feeling seems to urge me on.  The same feeling that came to me on the day we had tea together—­the feeling that made me—­that almost made me believe—­”

“Believe what?” The words escaped him without volition.

At sound of his voice she turned.  “Believe that a miracle had happened,” she said—­“that you had found strength—­had freed yourself.”

“From morphia?”

“From morphia.”

In the silence that followed, Loder lived through a century of suggestion and indecision.  His first feeling was for himself, but his first clear thought was for Chilcote and their compact.  He stood, metaphorically, on a stone in the middle of a stream, balancing on one foot, then the other; looking to the right bank, then to the left.  At last, as it always did, inspiration came to him slowly.  He realized that by one plunge he might save both Chilcote and himself!