When understanding came, a flush suffused her face.
"I do not know," she said, faltering a little.
This was hardly a truthful answer.

For, as if an obscuring veil had suddenly been rent that morning, she was permitted at last to see Peter Blood in his true relations to other men, and that sight, vouchsafed her twenty-four hours too late, filled her with pity and regret and yearning.
Lord Julian knew enough of women to be left in no further doubt.

He bowed his head so that she might not see the anger in his eyes, for as a man of honour he took shame in that anger which as a human being he could not repress.
And because Nature in him was stronger--as it is in most of us--than training, Lord Julian from that moment began, almost in spite of himself, to practise something that was akin to villainy.

I regret to chronicle it of one for whom--if I have done him any sort of justice--you should have been conceiving some esteem.

But the truth is that the lingering remains of the regard in which he had held Peter Blood were choked by the desire to supplant and destroy a rival.