"How could he tell her?" he asked.

She frowned at him, with reproach that was explicit now, and a
kind of pained astonishment.

"How could he help telling her?" she cried. "But--but it was
the one great fact between them. But it was a fact that
intimately concerned her--it was a fact of her own destiny.
But it was her right to be told. Do you seriously mean that he
did n't tell her? But why did n't he? What could have
possessed him?"

There was something like a tremor in her voice. "I must appear
entirely nonchalant and candid," Peter remembered.

"I fancy he was possessed, in some measure, by a sense of the
liberty he had taken by a sense of what one might, perhaps,
venture to qualify as his 'cheek.' For, if it was n't already
a liberty to embody his notion of her in a novel--in a
published book, for daws to peck at--it would have become a
liberty the moment he informed her that he had done so. That
would have had the effect of making her a kind of involuntary
particeps criminis."

"Oh, the foolish man!" sighed the Duchessa, with a rueful shake
of the head. "His foolish British self-consciousness! His
British inability to put himself in another person's place, to
see things from another's point of view! Could n't he see,
from her point of view, from any point of view but his own,