the
only way she could express it. It was as though he and she had been
looking at two sides of the same thing, and the side she had seen had
been all light and life, and his a place of graves...

She didn't now recall who had spoken first, or even, very clearly, what
had been said. It seemed to her only a moment later that she had found
herself standing at the other end of the room--the room which had
suddenly grown so small that, even with its length between them, she
felt as if he touched her--crying out to him "It IS because of you she's
going!" and reading the avowal in his face.

That was his secret, then, THEIR secret: he had met the girl in
Paris and helped her in her straits--lent her money, Anna vaguely
conjectured--and she had fallen in love with him, and on meeting him
again had been suddenly overmastered by her passion. Anna, dropping back
into her sofa-corner, sat staring these facts in the face.

The girl had been in a desperate plight--frightened, penniless, outraged
by what had happened, and not knowing (with a woman like Mrs. Murrett)
what fresh injury might impend; and Darrow, meeting her in this
distracted hour, had pitied, counselled, been kind to her, with the
fatal, the inevitable result. There were the facts as Anna made them
out: that, at least, was their external aspect, was as much of them as
she had been suffered to see; and into the secret intricacies they might
cover she dared not yet project her thoughts.

"I must believe him...I must believe him..." She kept on repeating the
words like a talisman. It was natural, after all, that he should have
behaved as he had: defended the girl's piteous secret to the last. She
too began to feel the contagion of his pity--the stir, in her breast, of
feelings deeper and more native to her than the pains of jealousy.
From the security of her blessedness she longed to lean over with
compassionate hands...But Owen? What was Owen's part to be? She owed
herself first to him--she was bound to protect him not only from all
knowledge of the secret she had surprised, but also--and chiefly!--from
its consequences. Yes: the girl must go--there could be no doubt of
it--Darrow himself had seen it from the first; and at the thought she
had a wild revulsion of relief, as though she had been trying to create
in her heart the delusion of a generosity she could not feel...

The one fact on which she could stay her mind was that Sophy was leaving
immediately; would b