He was no sooner out of the house than he felt the necessity of
returning. He did not know how or when Miss Hernshaw would write to St.
John, but that she would do so, he did not at all doubt, and then, when
the truth came out, what would she think of him? He did not think her a
very wise person; she seemed to him rather a wild and whirling person in
her ideals of conduct, an unbridled and undisciplined person; and yet he
was aware of profoundly and tenderly respecting her as a creature of the
most inexpugnable innocence and final goodness. He could not bear to have
her feel that he had trifled with her. There had not been many meetings
between them, but each meeting had been of such event that it had
advanced their acquaintance far beyond the point that it could have
reached through weeks of ordinary association. From the first there had
been that sort of intimacy which exists between spirits which encounter
in the region of absolute sincerity. She had never used the least of
those arts which women use in concealing the candor of their natures from
men unworthy of it; she had not only practiced her rule of instant and
constant veracity, but had avowed it, and as it were, invited his
judgment of it. Hitherto, he had met her half-way at least, but now he
was in the coil of a disingenuousness which must more and more trammel
him from her, unless he found some way to declare the fact to her.

This ought to have been an easy matter, but it was not easy; upon
reflection it grew rather more difficult. Hewson did not see how he could
avow the fact, which he wished to avow, without intolerable awkwardness;
without the effect of boasting, without putting upon her a burden which
he had no right to put. To be sure, she had got herself in for it all by
her divine imprudence, but she had owned her error in that as promptly as
if it had been the blame of some one else. Still Hewson doubted whether
her magnanimity was large enough to go round in the case of a man who
tried to let his magnanimity come upon her with any sort of dramatic