Besides, as he assured himself, he would only be enlarging a story which she had told: it was her tongue, not his, that had proclaimed it. And whether happiness or despair came to him from the event, it could at least bring her no change of fortune.
But with the very assertion of her security came apprehension from a possibility he had not foreseen.
What if Lilias, finding that those letters in no way absolved him, but proved the woman guilty of an unforgivable perfidy, should turn vengefully against her the secrets which they held?
The fear swept clear his clouded honour. Here was he answering a woman's baseness in the very fashion he had impeached as her habitual use.
He was fighting her malicious treachery with a betrayal as infamous, and which could be no whit excused by hers.
The sacredness of such letters could not be altered by circumstances; love had written them for love's eye only, and they must be held inviolable though love turned to hate.
And it was not only his personal honour that restrained him, but the honour of love itself; the silence, the gravity which every great service imposes upon those who have borne it; the duty of handing down unsullied, unspoken of, the proud name the brave tradition to those that come after.
It was because Love had indeed touched him with its sceptre that he could shield in silence one who had worn its name unworthily even while under it she had stabbed him to the heart.
He laid his hand upon the packet to return it to its place. Then, with sudden hesitation and a rueful smile at the sense of his own weakness, he rose and carried it across to the grate.
He laid it on the coals and lit a match beneath it; and, as he turned away again towards the window, heard in the blaze his hope and his despair together flame indifferently to the sky.