at
place of magic and of charm where if she had remained she would have had
power to hurt him.

When he considered her letter yet again in the calmness of that thought,
it struck him that Violet herself was offering him support and
consolation. "You shouldn't have married me. You should have married a
girl like Winny Dymond."--"I knew you'd marry her if I let you alone."
Why, after all these years, had she confessed her treachery? Why had she
confessed it now at the precise moment when she had left him? There was
no need. It couldn't help her. No, but it was just possible (for she was
quite intelligent) that she had seen how it might help him. It was
possible that some sort of contrition had visited her in that last
hour, and that she had meant to remind him that he was not utterly
abandoned, that there was something left.

That brought him to the lines, almost indecipherable, squeezed in her
last hurried moment into the margin of the letter. "You mustn't be
afraid of being fond of Baby. There was nothing between me and Leonard
before July of last year."

She had foreseen the supreme issue; she had provided for the worst
sting, the unspeakable suspicion, the intolerable terror. It was as if
she had calculated the precise point where her infidelity would touch
him.

Faced with that issue, Ranny's mind, like a young thing forced to sudden
tragic maturity by a mortal crisis, worked with an incredible clearness
and capacity. It developed an almost superhuman subtlety of
comprehension. He looked at the thing all round; he controlled his
passion so that he might look at it. It was of course open to him to
take it that she had lied. Passion indeed clamored at him, insisting
that she did lie, that lying came easier to her than the truth. But,
looking at it all round without passion, he was inclined to think that
Violet had not lied. She had not given herself time or space to lie for
lying's sake. If she had lied, then, she had lied for a purpose. A
purpose that he could very well conceive. But if she lied for _that_
purpose she would have given importance and prominence to her lie. She
wouldn't have hidden it away in an almost invisible scrawl on an
inadequate margin.

Of course, she might have lied to deceive him for another purpose, for
his own good. But there again conscious deception would have made for
legibility at the least.

Besides, she had put it in a way that left no room for doubt. "You
needn't be afraid of