Peregrine’s confession in the kitchen is this section’s central reversal, and it serves as both a plot point and a fundamental perspective shift for Charles. He has spent days certain that Ben pushed him into Minn’s cauldron, and the certainty has felt to him like proof, just as his earlier certainties have. When James pries the truth out of Peregrine, who confesses to pushing Charles because of a decade-old grievance over Rosina, Charles’s response is telling: He relinquishes the Ben-pushed-me theory and immediately constructs the Ben-killed-Titus theory in its place, with the same conviction and the same absence of evidence. The novel’s exploration of jealousy now encompasses Peregrine as well, as he names what Charles’s betrayal has done to him over the years: “[Y]ou’ve been with me like a demon, like a cancer” (394). His fixation echoes Charles’s own admission that he “could only think, over and over again, certain agonizing thoughts” (387). True to his character, however, Charles doesn’t recognize this. The confession does not cure Charles of his tendency toward presumption; he simply reaches for a new object.

Charles’s tea at Nibletts denies him the confrontation he has armed himself for, further highlighting the gap between Charles’s perspective and reality. Ben and Hartley are cleanly dressed, the iced cake is set out, and the tea is very proper. He recognizes that the couple has just played Greensleeves on their recorders, the song that was Charles and Hartley’s in childhood. Charles registers this as a desecration, then as a possible signal, then forgets it. The Nostalgic Power of First Love is exposed by Charles’s reading of every detail in the room as a coded message: The changed time on the invitation must mean she will be alone. Later, after she leaves and Charles returns, he is sure that the stone in the garden must be a sign, and the unopened letter under the linoleum must be meaningful somehow. Charles’s interpretive faculty cannot register a refusal as a refusal; it can only convert refusal into a puzzle that needs a different solution. When he reads the neighbor’s postcard from Sydney, the private mythology he has maintained for 40 years finally disperses under the reality that Hartley has truly gone.

Titus’s death works structurally as the cost of everything that Charles has set in motion, and Charles knows it without quite letting himself know it. He records the specific failure: He never warned the boy about the sea because warning would have spoiled the picture of himself diving in fearlessly on the first day. He admits, “I acted out of vanity” (398). The Futility of Renouncing One’s Nature is illustrated here, because Charles came to Shruff End announcing a turn from theatrical self-display toward simple goodness, and the boy has died as a result of both Charles’s vanity and his manipulations. The fantasy of “a little house by the sea” with Hartley repeats the same structure: A renunciation of his former life, imagined as a performance with Hartley cast in it (367). Even his revenge plans against Ben, Charles recognizes, are “[his] own death that [he] was planning” (390). His retirement to the simple life keeps producing more stagecraft, not less.

James’s death and Charles’s recovered memory of the rescue reframe his whole stay at Shruff End. Dr. Tsang’s letter gives Charles a model of relinquishment that is not theatrical, representing James as a man who simply chooses his moment and stops. Set against this, Charles’s “abjuring magic” looks like what Peregrine has already called it, an exploded myth, an old magician who cannot stop casting. His retirement project returns here at a different pitch, because Charles can now feel the difference between James’s quiet exit and his own loud one. The seals at dawn, “beneficent beings come to visit me and bless me” (471), arrive after Charles has, for the first time in the book, stopped trying to direct the action. The reassessment will not undo the harm Charles has done, but his thought as he goes back to sleep, “Who is one’s first love? Who indeed” (471), gestures at a question he has not previously been able to ask: whether the figure he installed in that role was ever the right one. This moment of insight offers the possibility that Charles has found his way to greater self-awareness.