She absolved him at every point, she adored her very wounds.

The passion by which he had profited had rushed back after its ebb, and now the tide of tenderness, arrested for ever at flood, was too deep even to fathom.

Stransom sincerely considered that he had forgiven him; but how little he had achieved the miracle that she had achieved! His forgiveness was silence, but hers was mere unuttered sound.

The light she had demanded for his altar would have broken his silence with a blare; whereas all the lights in the church were for her too great a hush.
She had been right about the difference--she had spoken the truth about the change: Stransom was soon to know himself as perversely but sharply jealous.

_His_ tide had ebbed, not flowed; if he had "forgiven" Acton Hague, that forgiveness was a motive with a broken spring.