himself the truth she had refused to give him; the effect of which
was to make her seem to him only more saturated with her fate. He
felt her spirit, through the whole strangeness, finer than his own
to the very degree in which she might have been, in which she
certainly had been, more wronged. A women, when wronged, was
always more wronged than a man, and there were conditions when the
least she could have got off with was more than the most he could
have to bear. He was sure this rare creature wouldn't have got off
with the least. He was awestruck at the thought of such a
surrender--such a prostration. Moulded indeed she had been by
powerful hands, to have converted her injury into an exaltation so
sublime. The fellow had only had to die for everything that was
ugly in him to be washed out in a torrent. It was vain to try to
guess what had taken place, but nothing could be clearer than that
she had ended by accusing herself. She absolved him at every
point, she adored her very wounds. The passion by which he had
profited had rushed back after its ebb, and now the tide of
tenderness, arrested for ever at flood, was too deep even to
fathom. Stransom sincerely considered that he had forgiven him;
but how little he had achieved the miracle that she had achieved!
His forgiveness was silence, but hers was mere unuttered sound.
The light she had demanded for his altar would have broken his
silence with a blare; whereas all the lights in the church were for
her too great a hush.

She had been right about the difference--she had spoken the truth
about the change: Stransom was soon to know himself as perversely
but sharply jealous. HIS tide had ebbed, not flowed; if he had
"forgiven" Acton Hague, that forgiveness was a motive with a broken
spring. The very fact of her appeal for a material sign, a sign