ter a moment they went in.

CHAPTER XXIII

There are occasions when thought is terribly and comprehensively
sudden: the rudimentary processes of reasoning, by analogy and
syllogism, so slow and so laborious, turn to divination. We have an
occult vision, immediate and complete, into the obscure manner of
life, and crowd an infinity of discovery into a very few seconds. It
was so with Philip Rainham now. Lightmark had scarcely closed the
door, against which he now stood in a black silence, with the air of
a man turned to stone; Rainham's eyes had only fallen once upon the
two figures on the sofa--Eve crushed in a corner, a sorrowful,
dainty shape in the silk and lace of her pretty tea-gown, with the
white drawn face of a scared child; Kitty Crichton, in her cloak and
hat, bending forward a little, the hectic flush of strong excitement
colouring her checks, that were already branded by her malady--when
he underwent a moral revolution. He had no more to learn. He glanced
at Lightmark curiously, almost impartially, his loathing strangely
tempered by a sort of self-contempt, that he should have been so
deluded. The clumsy lies which this man had told him, and which he
in his indolent charity had believed! All at once, and finally, in a
flash of brutal illumination, he saw Lightmark, who had once been
his friend, as he really was, naked and unclean. It stripped him of
all his superficial qualities; the mask of genial good-nature, the
air of good-fellowship, under which his gross egoism lay concealed
that it might be more securely mischievous when it went loose. His
amiability was an imposture, a dangerous harlequinade; the man was
bad. It was a plausible scoundrel, a vulgar profligate with a
handsome face and a few cheap talents--had he not been reduced to
stealing the picture of his friend?--whom these two women had loved,
to whom one of them was married. Ah, the sting of it lay there! Good
or bad, he was Eve's husband, and she was his wife, bound to him
until the end. And then, for the first time, seeing her there,
helpless and terrified, in her forlorn prettiness, he deceived
himself no longer, wrapped up his tenderness for the woman, his
angry pity for her misery that was coming, in no false terms. Such
self-deception, honest as it had been, was no longer possible. He
knew now that he loved her, and all that his love had been--the very
salt and savour of life to him, the one delicious and adorable pain
relieving t