"Look here, Bunning, perhaps it will help you if you know the way that I'm feeling about it. I'll try and explain. All these days there's something in me that's urging me to go out and confess."
"Conscience," said Bunning solemnly.
"No, it isn't conscience at all. It's something quite different, because the thing that's urging me isn't urging me because I've done something I'm ashamed of, it's urging me because I'm in a false position. There's that on the one side, and, on the other, I'm in love with Rupert Craven's sister."
Bunning gave a little cry.
"Yes. That complicates things, doesn't it? Now you see why Rupert Craven is the last person who must know anything about it; it's because he loves his sister so much and suspects, I think, that I care for her, that he's going to find out the truth."
"Does she care for you?" Bunning brought out huskily.
"I don't know. That's what I've got to find out."
"Because it all depends on that. If she cares enough it won't matter what you've done, and if she doesn't care enough it won't matter her knowing because you oughtn't to marry her. Oh," and Bunning's eyes as they gazed at Olva were those, once more, of a devoted dog: "she's lucky." Then he repeated, as though to himself, in his odd husky whisper: "Anything that I can do . . . anything that I can do . . ."
2
On the next evening, about five o'clock, Olva went to the house in Rocket Road. He went through a world that, in its frosty stillness, held beauty in its hands like a china cup, so fragile in its colours, so gentle in its outline, with a moon, round and of a creamy white, with a sky faintly red, and stiff trees, black and sharp.