He was no intentional deceiver; he was so self-deceived, that, being himself a deception, he could be nothing but a deceiver--at once the most complete and the most pardonable, and perhaps the most dangerous of deceivers.
With all his fine talk of love, to which he now gave full flow, it was characteristic of him that, although he saw Letty without hat or cloak, just because he was himself warmly clad, he never thought of her being cold, until the arm he had thrown round her waist felt her shiver.
Thereupon he was kind, and would have insisted that she should go in and get a shawl, had she not positively refused to go in and come out again.

Then he would have had her put on his coat, that she might be able to stay a little longer; but she prevailed on him to let her go.
He brought her to the nearest point not within sight of any of the windows, and, there leaving her, set out at a rapid pace for the inn where he had put up his mare.
When Tom was gone, and the bare night, a diffused conscience, all about her, Letty, with a strange fear at her heart, like one in a churchyard, with the ghost-hour at hand, and feeling like "a guilty thing surprised," although she had done nothing wrong in its mere self, stole back to the door of the kitchen, longing for the shelter of her own room, as never exile for his fatherland.
She had left the door an inch ajar, that she might run the less risk of making a noise in opening it; but ere she reached it, the moon shining full upon it, she saw plainly, and her heart turned sick when she saw, that it was closed.

Between cold and terror she shuddered from head to foot, and stood staring.
Recovering a little, she said to herself some draught must have blown it to.

If so, there was much danger that the noise had been heard; but, in any case, there was no time to lose.

She glided swiftly to it.