As he looked at the task before him he began to realize its difficulty.
He was profoundly in love with her, he was still only learning how
deeply, and she was not going to play a merely passive part in this
affair. She was perhaps as deeply in love with him....

He could not bring himself to the idea of confessions and disavowals. He
could not bear to think of her disillusionment. He felt that he owed it
to her not to disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion.
"To turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in me....
It would be like playing a practical joke upon her. It would be like
taking her into my arms and suddenly making a grimace at her.... It
would scar her with a second humiliation...."

Should he take her on to Bath or Exeter to-morrow and contrive by some
sudden arrival of telegrams that he had to go from her suddenly? But a
mere sudden parting would not end things between them now unless he
went off abruptly without explanations or any arrangements for further
communications. At the outset of this escapade there had been a tacit
but evident assumption that it was to end when she joined her father at
Falmouth. It was with an effect of discovery that Sir Richmond realized
that now it could not end in that fashion, that with the whisper of love
and the touching of lips, something had been started that would go on,
that would develop. To break off now and go away without a word would
leave a raw and torn end, would leave her perplexed and perhaps even
more humiliated with an aching mystery to distress her. "Why did he go?
Was it something I said?--something he found out or imagined?"

Parting had disappeared as a possible solution of this problem. She and
he had got into each other's lives to stay: the real problem was
the terms upon which they were to stay in each other's lives. Close
association had brought them to the point of being, in the completest
sense, lovers; that could not be; and the real problem was the
transmutation of their relationship to some form compatible with his
honour and her happiness. A word, an idea, from some recent reading
floated into Sir Richmond's head. "Sublimate," he whispered. "We have
to sublimate this affair. We have to put this relationship upon a Higher
Plane."

His mind stopped short at that.

Presently his voice sounded out of the depths of his heart. "God! How I
loathe the Higher Plane!....

"God has put me into this Higher Plane bus