The retrospective affair occupied her more secretly, but more engrossingly. Behind all the splendour and gaiety and interest and sunlight there hung a background which concerned her more intimately than any of those things: compared with it, nothing else had colour or brightness. And her father had told her that this background was stained and daubed with dirt, with commonness, with things not to be associated with.... Never had the subject been ever so remotely alluded to again between them: Charles' name had not crossed her lips or his. She had never asked him who his informant was, but she felt that any such question was superfluous. She knew; her whole heart and mind told her that she knew. Whether she had ever actually believed the tale she scarcely remembered: anyhow she had accepted it as far as action went. But now, without further evidence on the subject, she utterly and passionately disbelieved it. By communing with herself she had arrived at the unshakeable conviction that it not only was not, but could not be true. Through quietly thinking of Charles, through telling over, like rosary beads, the hours of their intercourse together, she had seen that. It was as clear as the simplest logical proposition.
But she saw also that when Craddock repeated the question he had asked her last June, he would ask it far more urgently and authentically. There had been no fire behind it then: now, she saw that he was kindled. Before, he used to look at her with unconcealed glances of direct admiration, make her great speeches of open compliment, comparing her to a Greek Victory, a Bacchante. Now he looked at her more shyly, more surreptitiously, and he paid her compliments no longer, just because they no longer expressed all he had to say about her: they had become worn, like defaced coins out of currency.
But this acquired seriousness and sincerity of feeling on his part, which before would have earned at any rate her sympathy, now, in the conviction she held that it was he who had spoken of Charles to her father, made him the more detestable as a wooer, even as in ordinary converse he now excited her disgustful antipathy. He was as pleasant, as agreeable, as clever and adaptable as before, but her conjectured knowledge had spread through his whole personality staining and poisoning it. He had thought--so she now supposed--to put a rival out of the field by this treacherous stab in the back, to unhorse him and ride over him. In that he had bitterly erred, and though still thinking he had succeeded, deep in her heart was his disgraceful failure blazoned. And daily she felt the nightmare of his renewed proposal was coming nearer. Very possibly, she thought, he was delaying speech until they should go up the Nile, and should be leading a more leisurely, and, she was afraid, a more intimate life in the comparative quietude of Luxor, where they proposed to make a long stay. For that reason, largely, she gladly joined her grandmother in her amazing activities in Cairo and gave the kindliest welcome to those pleasant young English soldiers who were so ready to come out to them.