He watched her in silence, his heart wrung with pity for her. After a moment he went on: “I’ve liked Cliff enormously since we came here. I’d rather—oh, anything—than tell you this, but now I have to. I think I even loved Cliff; I don’t know. After we met on the boat I seemed to fall under a kind of spell—almost like falling in love. It was completely involuntary on my part, I swear to you. I didn’t even realize it was happening. Had I known— But the point is, I didn’t know. Truly I didn’t. I wasn’t aware of it. It had nothing to do with me at all—or with us.”

The hands came down. “Nothing to do with us,” she said, so bitterly and so low that he could scarcely hear her, “—how can you say that!”

He had the awful feeling that these words were meaningless now, but he felt a compulsion to go on, futile though they were. “It was out of our control, I mean. It didn’t affect my love for you in the slightest—except as it bewildered me, upset me without my knowing why, made me touchy and difficult. All right! I’ve loved Cliff this past week, but at least now I know it.”

The conversation was carried out on both their parts in the quietest of tones, as if each were facing himself alone. It was no moment for shrill reproach or strained defense.

“What does it mean,” she said, expecting no answer. “I’ve been asking myself, ever since I found this, what does it mean. . . .”

“It means what I tell you. You’ve got to believe me, Ethel. If ever you trusted me, you must trust me now. I admit it was a fool thing to do, taking Cliff’s overseas cap. I felt like an idiot at the time, but—I wanted it. It doesn’t matter so much now.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘now’?”

He told her, then, what had happened last night in the fog, where he had gone unknowingly, what he had found, and what it had revealed to him. “I didn’t lose my way,” he said finally. “I went down there purposely in the dark, as if by design—like a man walking in his sleep, determined to do unconsciously what I consciously knew I must not do. You can put it that I was deranged or out of control, like the shock victim who passes through fright to panic to disorientation. Then I found the bottle of sun-­tan oil—I had gone straight to the beach. When Cliff wanted to spread it on my shoulders, you yourself were angry with me for acting like such a fool. I was a fool, nothing worse.”

“It’s perversion,” she said, daring it in her despair.