Peter had to repeat his act of will.

“How could he tell her?” he asked.

She frowned at him, with reproach that was explicit now, and a kind of pained astonishment.

“How could he help telling her?” she cried.  “But—­but it was the one great fact between them.  But it was a fact that intimately concerned her—­it was a fact of her own destiny.  But it was her right to be told.  Do you seriously mean that he did n’t tell her?  But why did n’t he?  What could have possessed him?”

There was something like a tremor in her voice.  “I must appear entirely nonchalant and candid,” Peter remembered.

“I fancy he was possessed, in some measure, by a sense of the liberty he had taken by a sense of what one might, perhaps, venture to qualify as his ‘cheek.’  For, if it was n’t already a liberty to embody his notion of her in a novel—­in a published book, for daws to peck at—­it would have become a liberty the moment he informed her that he had done so.  That would have had the effect of making her a kind of involuntary particeps criminis.”

“Oh, the foolish man!” sighed the Duchessa, with a rueful shake of the head.  “His foolish British self-consciousness!  His British inability to put himself in another person’s place, to see things from another’s point of view!  Could n’t he see, from her point of view, from any point of view but his own, that it was her right to be told?  That the matter affected her in one way, as much as it affected him in another?  That since she had influenced—­since she had contributed to—­his life and his art as she had, it was her right to know it?  Couldn’t he see that his ‘cheek,’ his real ‘cheek,’ began when he withheld from her that great strange chapter of her own history?  Oh, he ought to have told her, he ought to have told her.”

She sank back in her chair, giving her head another rueful shake, and gazed ruefully away, over the sunny landscape, through the mellow atmosphere, into the golden-hazy distance.

Peter looked at her—­and then, quickly, for caution’s sake, looked elsewhere.

“But there were other things to be taken into account,” he said.

The Duchessa raised her eyes.  “What other things?” they gravely questioned.

“Would n’t his telling her have been equivalent to a declaration of love?” questioned he, looking at the signet-ring on the little finger of his left hand.

“A declaration of love?” She considered for a moment.  “Yes, I suppose in a way it would,” she acknowledged.  “But even so?” she asked, after another moment of consideration.  “Why should he not have made her a declaration of love?  He was in love with her, wasn’t he?”

The point of frank interrogation in her eyes showed clearly, showed cruelly, how detached, how impersonal, her interest was.