He had held to a rather lukewarm faith
that something remained in him to be called forth, and that the voice
that should call would be heard in its own time, if ever, and not
through any seeking.

But he had not thought of the possibility that, if this proved true some
day, the truth might come in a sinister shape. The two things that had
taken him utterly by surprise in the matter of his feeling towards Mabel
Manderson were the insane suddenness of its uprising in full strength
and its extravagant hopelessness. Before it came, he had been much
disposed to laugh at the permanence of unrequited passion as a generous
boyish delusion. He knew now that he had been wrong, and he was living
bitterly in the knowledge.

Before the eye of his fancy the woman always came just as she was when
he had first had sight of her, with the gesture which he had surprised
as he walked past unseen on the edge of the cliff; that great gesture of
passionate joy in her new liberty which had told him more plainly than
speech that her widowhood was a release from torment, and had confirmed
with terrible force the suspicion, active in his mind before, that it
was her passport to happiness with a man whom she loved. He could not
with certainty name to himself the moment when he had first suspected
that it might be so. The seed of the thought must have been sown, he
believed, at his first meeting with Marlowe; his mind would have noted
automatically that such evident strength and grace, with the sort of
looks and manners that the tall young man possessed, might go far with
any woman of unfixed affections. And the connection of this with what
Mr. Cupples had told him of the Mandersons' married life must have
formed itself in the unconscious depths of his mind. Certainly it had
presented itself as an already established thing when he began, after
satisfying himself of the identity of the murderer, to cast about for
the motive of the crime. Motive, motive! How desperately he had sought
for another, turning his back upon that grim thought, that
Marlowe--obsessed by passion like himself, and privy perhaps to
maddening truths about the wife's unhappiness--had taken a leaf, the
guiltiest, from the book of Bothwell. But in all his investigations at
the time, in all his broodings on the matter afterwards, he had been
able to discover nothing else that could prompt Marlowe to such a
deed--nothing but that temptation, the whole strength of which he could
no