He crossed quickly to the fireplace and stood by Eve.  “You were right in your belief,” he said.  “For all that time from the night you spoke to me of Fraide to the day you had tea in this room—­I never touched a drug.”

She moved suddenly, and he saw her face.  “John,” she said, unsteadily, “you—­I—­I have known you to lie to me—­about other things.”

With a hasty movement he averted his head.  The doubt, the appeal in her words shocked him.  The whole isolation of her life seemed summed up in the one short sentence.  For the instant he forgot Chilcote.  With a reaction of feeling he turned to her again.

“Look at me!” he said, brusquely.

She raised her eyes.

“Do you believe I’m speaking the truth?”

She searched his eyes intently, the doubt and hesitancy still struggling in her face.

“But the last three weeks?” she said, reluctantly.  “How can you ask me to believe?”

He had expected this, and he met it steadily enough; nevertheless his courage faltered.  To deceive this woman, even to justify himself, had in the last halfhour become something sacrilegious.

“The last three weeks must be buried,” he said, hurriedly.  “No man could free himself suddenly from—­from a vice.”  He broke off abruptly.  He hated Chilcote; he hated himself.  Then Eve’s face, raised in distressed appeal, overshadowed all scruples.  “You have been silent and patient for years,” he said, suddenly.  “Can you be patient and silent a little longer?” He spoke without consideration.  He was conscious of no selfishness beneath his words.  In the first exercise of conscious strength the primitive desire to reduce all elements to his own sovereignty submerged every other emotion.  “I can’t enter into the thing,” he said; “like you, I give no explanations.  I can only tell you that on the day we talked together in this room I was myself—­in the full possession of my reason, the full knowledge of my own capacities.  The man you have known in the last three weeks, the man you have imagined in the last four years, is a shadow, an unreality—­a weakness in human form.  There is a new Chilcote—­if you will only see him.”

Ewe was trembling as he ceased; her face was flushed; there was a strange brightness in her eyes She was moved beyond herself.

“But the other you—­the old you?”

“You must be patient.”  He looked down into the fire.  “Times like the last three weeks will come again—­must come again; they are inevitable.  When they do come, you must shut your eyes—­you must blind yourself.  You must ignore them—­and me.  Is it a compact?” He still avoided her eyes.

She turned to him quietly.  “Yes—­if you wish it,” she said, below her breath.

He was conscious of her glance, but he dared not meet it.  He felt sick at the part he was playing, yet he held to it tenaciously.