so calculating and determined and ambitious!" They came to her now, flashed between the eager solicitous eyes of her mind and the scene of a perfect and everlasting reconciliation which it conjured up--flashed and were gone; for her will rose up and blurred them into mist; and other words of that true palimpsest of Sybil Eglington's broken life came instead: "And though he loves me little, as he loves you little too, yet he is my son, and for what he is we are both responsible one way or another." As the mother, so the wife.

She said to herself now in sad paraphrase, "And though he loves me little, yet he is my husband, and for what he is it may be that I am in some sense responsible." Yet he is my husband! All that it was came to her; the closed door, the drawn blinds; the intimacy which shut them away from all the world; the things said which can only be said without desecration between two honest souls who love each other; and that sweet isolation which makes marriage a separate world, with its own sacred revelation.

This she had known; this had been; and though the image of the sacred thing had been defaced, yet the shrine was not destroyed.
For she believed that each had kept the letter of the law; that, whatever his faults, he had turned his face to no other woman.

If she had not made his heart captive and drawn him by an ever-shortening cord of attraction, yet she was sure that none other had any influence over him, that, as he had looked at her in those short-lived days of his first devotion, he looked at no other.

The way was clear yet.