told her she could now have the altar to herself; but she only
shook her head with pleading sadness, begging him not to waste his
breath on the impossible, the extinct. Couldn't he see that in
relation to her private need the rites he had established were
practically an elaborate exclusion? She regretted nothing that had
happened; it had all been right so long as she didn't know, and it
was only that now she knew too much and that from the moment their
eyes were open they would simply have to conform. It had doubtless
been happiness enough for them to go on together so long. She was
gentle, grateful, resigned; but this was only the form of a deep
immoveability. He saw he should never more cross the threshold of
the second room, and he felt how much this alone would make a
stranger of him and give a conscious stiffness to his visits. He
would have hated to plunge again into that well of reminders, but
he enjoyed quite as little the vacant alternative.

After he had been with her three or four times it struck him that
to have come at last into her house had had the horrid effect of
diminishing their intimacy. He had known her better, had liked her
in greater freedom, when they merely walked together or kneeled
together. Now they only pretended; before they had been nobly
sincere. They began to try their walks again, but it proved a lame
imitation, for these things, from the first, beginning or ending,
had been connected with their visits to the church. They had
either strolled away as they came out or gone in to rest on the
return. Stransom, besides, now faltered; he couldn't walk as of
old. The omission made everything false; it was a dire mutilation
of their lives. Our friend was frank and monotonous, making no
mystery of his remonstrance and no secret of his predicament. Her
response, whatever it was, always came to the same thing--an