Before they were half-way to the shingle Roland felt that he had won. The conviction gave him a new kind of power--the power all women delight to acknowledge; the sweet dictation, the loving tyranny that claims every thought of the beloved. Roland told Denas she must not dare to remember anyone but him; he would feel it and know it if she did. She promised this readily. She must not tell Elizabeth. Elizabeth was unreasonable, she was even jealous of everything concerning her brother; she would have a hundred objections; she would influence his father unfavourably; she would do all she could to prevent their seeing each other, etc., etc. And where a man pleads, one woman is readily persuaded against another. But Denas was much harder to persuade where the article of secrecy touched her father and mother. Her conscience, uneasy for some time, told her positively at this point that deception was wicked and dangerous. Roland could not win from her a promise in this direction. But he was not afraid--he was sure he could trust to her love and her desire to please him.
One of the cruellest things about a wrong love is that it delights in tangles and hidden ways; that it teaches and practises deceit from its first inception; that its earliest efforts are toward destroying all older and more sacred attachments. Roland was not willing to take the hand of Denas in the face of the world and say: "This is my beloved wife." Yet for the secret pleasure of his secret love, he expected Denas to wrong father-love and mother-love and to deceive day by day the friend and the companion who had been so kind and so fairly loyal to her.
No wonder John Penelles hated him instinctively. John's soul needed but a glimpse of the lovers sauntering down the narrow cliff-path to apprehend the beginning of sorrows. Instantaneous as the glimpse was, it explained to him the restless, angry, fearful feeling that had driven him from his own cottage to the place appointed by destiny for the revelation of his child's danger and of his own admonition.
He was glad that he had obeyed the spiritual order; whatever power had warned him had done him service. It is true the fond assurances of Denas had somewhat pacified his suspicions, but he was not altogether satisfied. When Denas declared that Roland had not made love to her, John felt certain that the girl was in some measure deceiving him--perhaps deceiving herself; for he could not imagine her to be guilty of a deliberate lie. Alas! lying is the vital air of secret love, and a girl must needs lie who hides from her parents the object and the course of her affections. Still, when he thought of her arms around his neck, of her cheek against his cheek, of her assertion that "Denas loved no one better than her father and mother," he felt it a kind of disloyalty to his child to altogether doubt her. He believed that Denas believed in herself. Well, then, he must try and trust her as far and as long as it was possible.