"It would have made her very unhappy; but there's a difference."

Yes: there was a difference; a difference which no rhetoric could disguise.
The secret sin would have made Mrs. Peyton wretched, but it would not
have killed her. And she would have taken precisely Denis's view of the
elasticity of atonement: she would have accepted private regrets as
the genteel equivalent of open expiation. Kate could even imagine her
extracting a "lesson" from the providential fact that her son had not
been found out.

"You see it's not so simple," he broke out, with a tinge of doleful
triumph.

"No: it's not simple," she assented.

"One must think of others," he continued, gathering faith in his argument
as he saw her reduced to acquiescence.

She made no answer, and after a moment he rose to go. So far, in
retrospect, she could follow the course of their talk; but when, in the
act of parting, argument lapsed into entreaty, and renunciation into the
passionate appeal to give him at least one more hearing, her memory lost
itself in a tumult of pain, and she recalled only that, when the door
closed on him, he took with him her promise to see him once again.


IV

She had promised to see him again; but the promise did not imply that she
had rejected his offer of freedom. In the first rush of misery she had not