noon
There had even been fevered moments when he told himself that he , Theo Desmond , not the crazy fanatic in quest of sainthood -- should by rights have been hanged and burned on the day of her death . The whole tragical tangle , blurred and distorted by incessant repetition , had come at last to seem almost a separate entity ; a horror , outside his own control , that now shrank to a pin-point and now loomed gigantic , oppressive , till all true sense of proportion was lost . The silence that he could not force himself to break , infallibly made matters worse . And now came Honor , re-awakening the great love he had wrestled with and trampled on to very small purpose ; a love beside which his chivalrous tenderness for Evelyn showed like the flame of a candle in the blaze of noon . Her sudden return , the perturbing sense of her nearness , had for the first time wrenched him away from the obsession of the past . But even now he dared not frankly face the future ; dared not let his mind dwell on the colourless emptiness of life without her . Neither could he , as yet , face the only alternative -- to tell her , of all women , that he had loved her before his wife 's death .