He was like a man who has been groping his way through difficult paths in the dark--uneasy, it may be, and nervous, but with no serious alarm.

On a sudden, a storm-flash may reveal to him that he is on the very edge of a precipice or already ankle-deep in some bottomless morass.

The sight of his own face, interpreted with all Morewood's penetrating insight and mastery of hand, had been a revelation to him.
No more mercilessly candid messenger could have been found.

Arguments he would have resisted or confuted; appeals to his own consciousness would have failed for want of experience; he could not affect to disbelieve the verdict of his own countenance.

He had in all his life been a man who dealt plainly with himself; it was only in this last matter that the power, more than the will, to understand his own heart had failed him.
His intellect now reasserted itself.