For the first time he saw in her face the consciousness of her own unfulfilment. "If you only knew how often I wonder if it is worth while," she answered.
At this he made a sudden start forward and then checked himself. "The chief tragedy in my life," he said, "is that I knew you twenty years too late."
Until his words were uttered he did not realise how much of a confession he had put into them; and with the discovery he watched her face bloom softly like a flower that opens its closed petals.
"If I could have helped you then, why cannot I help you now?" she asked, while the innocence in her look humbled him more than a divine fury would have done. The larger his ideal of her became, the keener grew his sense of failure—of bondage to that dead past from which he could never release his living body. As he looked at her now he realised that the supreme thing he had missed in life was the control of the power which lies in simple goodness; and the purity of Lydia appeared to him as a shining blank—an unwritten surface beside the passionate humanity in the heart of the girl before him.
"You will hear things from others which I can't tell you and then you will understand," he said.
"I shall hear nothing that will make me cease to believe in you," she answered.
"You will hear that I have done wrong in my life and you will understand that if I have suffered it has been by my own fault."
She met his gaze without wavering.
"I shall still believe in you," she responded.
Her eyes were on his face and she saw that the wan light of the afterglow revealed the angularities of his brow and chin and filled in with shadows the deeper hollows in his temples. The smile on his lips was almost ironical as he answered.