THE BRASS BOWL
if. … But it was too preposterous to credit, that he should have cared enough. … Quite too preposterous! It was her cup, her bitter cup, to know that she had learned to care enoughat sight! … And she recalled (with what pangs of shame and misery begged expression!) how her heart had been stirred when she had found him (as she thought) true to his tryst: even as she recalled the agony and distress of mind with which she had a moment later fathomed Anisty's impersonation.
For, of course, she had known that Maitland was Maitland and none other, from the instant when he told her to make good her escape and leave him to brazen it out: a task to daunt even as bold and resourceful a criminal as Anisty, and more especially if he were called upon to don the mask at a minute's notice, as Maitland had pretended to. Or, if she had not actually known, she had been led to suspect: and it had hardly needed what she had heard him say to the servants, when he thought her flying hotfoot over the lawn to safety, to harden suspicion into certainty.
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