("Yes, yes," her heart cried out, "I believe in him, because he didn't tell the truth about that letter to Horace." She could have loved him for that lie.)
He was now at liberty to part with her on that understanding, leaving her to think him all that was disinterested and honourable and fine. But he could not do it. Not in the face of her almost impassioned declaration of belief. At that moment he was ready rather to fall at her feet in the torture of his shame. And as he looked at her, tears came into his eyes, those tears that cut through the flesh like knives, that are painful to bring forth and terrible to see.
"I've not been an honest man, though. I've no right to let you believe in me."
Her face was sweeter than ever with its piteous, pathetic smile struggling through the white eclipse of grief.
"What have you done?"
"It's not what I've done. It's what I didn't do. I told you that I knew the library was going to be sold. I told you that yesterday, and you naturally thought I only knew it yesterday, didn't you?"
"Well, yes, but I don't see—"
She paused, and his confession dropped into the silence with an awful weight.
"I knew—all the time."
She leaned back in her chair, the change of bodily posture emphasizing the spiritual recoil.