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240 into this intolerable predicament. How to get out of it lie could not see. The impulse of confession was so strong in him that he had to fight it down consciously. He desired intensely to tell Teresa everything, to make her feel as nothing else now could, the real unimportance of his liaison, to himself and to her. But a feeling that he would be a cur if he told, miserably held him back. He had not yet admitted anything to her. He must deny it, not for his own sake, but for that of the other woman. Only he could not deny convincingly. His lies, he knew, must be half hearted. Each one put another barrier in the way of Teresa's understanding of him, given the moral certainty of the truth which, in some mysterious way, she seemed to to have acquired. How she had leaped to that certainty he could not see. In another woman her attitude might have been a ruse, but Teresa was not artful. She believed that he had been deceiving her, and was still trying to do so; she could not possibly know how essentially truthful, so far as their own real relation went, he had always been.

"You can't tell me—can you?" she repeated softly.

"I can't tell you more than I have already said. I've not been unfaithful to you, Teresa. This suspicion that you've got in your head is absolutely wrong."