When accordingly at five she presented herself I naturally felt false and base. My act had been a momentary madness, but I had at least to be consistent. She remained an hour; he of course never came; and I could only persist in my perfidy. I had thought it best to let her come; singular as this now seems to me I thought it diminished my guilt. Yet as she sat there so visibly white and weary, stricken with a sense of everything her husband’s death had opened up, I felt an almost intolerable pang of pity and remorse. If I didn’t tell her on the spot what I had done it was because I was too ashamed. I feigned astonishment--I feigned it to the end; I protested that if ever I had had confidence I had had it that day. I blush as I tell my story--I take it as my penance. There was nothing indignant I didn’t say about him; I invented suppositions, attenuations; I admitted in stupefaction, as the hands of the clock travelled, that their luck hadn’t turned. She smiled at this vision of their “luck,” but she looked anxious--she looked unusual: the only thing that kept me up was the fact that, oddly enough, she wore mourning--no great depths of crape, but simple and scrupulous black. She had in her bonnet three small black feathers. She carried a little muff of astrachan. This put me by the aid of some acute reflection a little in the right. She had written to me that the sudden event made no difference for her, but apparently it made as much difference as that. If she was inclined to the usual forms why didn’t she observe that of not going the first day or two out to tea? There was some one she wanted so much to see that she couldn’t wait till her husband was buried. Such a betrayal of eagerness made me hard and cruel enough to practise my odious deceit, though at the same time, as the hour waxed and waned, I suspected in her something deeper still than disappointment and somewhat less successfully concealed. I mean a strange underlying relief, the soft, low emission of the breath that comes when a danger is past. What happened as she spent her barren hour with me was that at last she gave him up. She let him go for ever. She made the most graceful joke of it that I’ve ever seen made of anything; but it was for all that a great date in her life. She spoke with her mild gaiety of all the other vain times, the long game of hide-and-seek, the unprecedented queerness of such a relation. For it was, or had been, a relation, wasn’t it, hadn’t it? That was just the absurd part of it. When she got up to go I said to her that it was more a relation than ever, but that I hadn’t the face after what had occurred to propose to her for the present another opportunity. It was plain that the only valid opportunity would be my accomplished marriage. Of course she would be at my wedding? It was even to be hoped that _he_ would.