that should make her dead lover equal there with the others,
presented the concession to her friend as too handsome for the
case. He had never thought of himself as hard, but an exorbitant
article might easily render him so. He moved round and round this
one, but only in widening circles--the more he looked at it the
less acceptable it seemed. At the same time he had no illusion
about the effect of his refusal; he perfectly saw how it would make
for a rupture. He left her alone a week, but when at last he again
called this conviction was cruelly confirmed. In the interval he
had kept away from the church, and he needed no fresh assurance
from her to know she hadn't entered it. The change was complete
enough: it had broken up her life. Indeed it had broken up his,
for all the fires of his shrine seemed to him suddenly to have been
quenched. A great indifference fell upon him, the weight of which
was in itself a pain; and he never knew what his devotion had been
for him till in that shock it ceased like a dropped watch. Neither
did he know with how large a confidence he had counted on the final
service that had now failed: the mortal deception was that in this
abandonment the whole future gave way.

These days of her absence proved to him of what she was capable;
all the more that he never dreamed she was vindictive or even
resentful. It was not in anger she had forsaken him; it was in
simple submission to hard reality, to the stern logic of life.
This came home to him when he sat with her again in the room in
which her late aunt's conversation lingered like the tone of a
cracked piano. She tried to make him forget how much they were
estranged, but in the very presence of what they had given up it
was impossible not to be sorry for her. He had taken from her so
much more than she had taken from him. He argued with her again,