"Roberts!" she gasped, gazing at him spellbound, "—how could you know?"
"Look at me again, Eleanor," he urged with infinite tenderness, but with an eager expectancy manifest in every feature,—"look hard."
She drew back speechless as the truth came to her.
"Oh, my Robert," she cried at last, with a joy in her voice which thrilled her hearers, "you—you were that man!"
It seemed a sacrilege to the two spectators of the unexpected climax of this intimate personal drama to remain, so instinctively they both withdrew silently to the drawing-room, leaving Eleanor closely enfolded in her husband's arms. For the first time since Covington had disclosed himself, Alice was alone with him. Wrought up as the girl had been by the conflicting emotions which had consumed her strength during the past moments, and relieved beyond measure by the final outcome of what had promised only a tragedy, yet her eyes filled with tears as she looked at him.
"Why did you do this?" she asked. "Why did you come into my life to teach me that this beautiful world of ours can contain so much that is bad?—you, whom I respected and admired, and whom I was beginning to believe I loved? How could you do it?"
Covington made no answer to the impelling voice which spoke. The girl, with her varying moods and changing conceits, who had so amused him, had vanished, and in her place he saw the woman, supreme in the strength of asserting that which is ever woman's creed,—justice and right. He could sense, in her attitude, as in her words, that her resentment was not because of the indignity which he had forced upon herself, but rather because of the wrong he had done to those she loved. What a woman to have called his wife,—what a woman to have lived up to as a husband!
"I must see your father again," he said when he spoke at last. "Let us go back to them."
Covington stood in the doorway of the library as Alice slipped quietly into the room and took her place beside Eleanor and her father. As he looked upon the three, forming a group into which he had almost entered, he realized the infinite distance which now separated them. Their total disregard of his presence, Gorham's lack of open resentment, Alice's indifference,—all told him that in their eyes he was only the pariah, beneath their contempt, suffered to remain there until he saw fit to rid them of his presence. Yet he could not leave them thus. Somewhere within him a something, until now quiescent, demanded recognition and insisted upon expression. Why had it waited until now! It was a changed John Covington who spoke from that doorway, when at last silence became unendurable. The hard lines in the face had softened, and the previously insistent voice now betrayed realization of the present, and hopelessness for the future. The fires of truth and love and faith and honor, which burned so brightly before him, at least touched him with their heat. God pity him!
"It is all over, Mr. Gorham," he forced himself to say. "It is not you who have defeated me, it is I who have defeated myself. I offer no defence. I despised myself before I did this, I despise myself still further for having done it. I could not believe you sincere,—I could not believe any man capable of living the creed you preached. I accept the penalty which you or other men may impose upon me."