' You changed your mind when you saw me come into Dorothy Emsworth's room,' he said. ' Now, I always meant to tell you about that. It is perfectly true that for nearly two years——— '
She held up her hand.
' You need not trouble,' she said. ' I know.'
Bilton paused a half-second to arrange his reply in the way he wished.
' I always supposed she would tell you,' he said.
Her silence admitted it, and he had scored a side-point. He wished to know whether Dorothy had told her.
' I think you are hard on me,' he said; ' or perhaps I do not understand. You were, before you knew that, prepared to accept my devotion. Do you reject it now because I have led that sort of life?'
Sybil frowned.
' I can't discuss the question with you,' she said. ' I will just suggest to you this, that you went to see your mistress while I, to whom you had expressed devotion, was staying in the house. If you can't understand my feeling about that, I can't explain it to you.'
' I will promise never to see her again,' said Bilton.
Suddenly and almost with the vividness of actual hallucination the figure of the man who was so like him rose up before Sybil, and she all but saw Charlie taking Bilton's place there, and imagined that it was he who was saying what Bilton said. For a moment she invested him with the grossness of his double, and loathed and shuddered at the picture she had conjured up. Charlie behaving like Bilton was an image so degrading and humiliating that she could not contemplate it. The very thought was to do him dishonour. But Bilton, so she recognised, was acting now up to his very best; it was the best of his nature which promised not to see Mrs. Emsworth again. But Charlie in a corresponding position was unthinkable. Against this
