Elmore. "I think I suffer less when I
do it than when I see it. It's horrible."

"He deserved it, every bit," returned his wife.

"Oh, I dare say," Elmore granted. "But the sight even of justice isn't
pleasant, I find."

"I don't understand you, Owen. How can you care so much for this
impudent wretch's little snub, and yet be so indifferent about refusing
Captain Ehrhardt?"

"I'm not indifferent about it, my dear. I know that I did right, but I
don't know that I could do right under the same circumstances again."

In fact there were times when Elmore found almost insupportable the
absolute conclusion to which that business had come. It is hard to
believe that anything has come to an end in this world. For a time,
death itself leaves the ache of an unsatisfied expectation, as if
somehow the interrupted life must go on, and there is no change we make
or suffer which is not denied by the sensation of daily habit. If
Ehrhardt had really come back from the vague limbo to which he had been
so inexorably relegated, he might only have restored the original
situation in all its discomfort and apprehension; yet maintaining, as he
did, this perfect silence and absence, he established a hold upon
Elmore's imagination which deepened because he could not discuss the
matter frankly with his wife. He weakly feared to let her know what was
passing in his thoughts, lest some misconception of hers should turn
them into self-accusal or urge him to some attempt at the reparation
towards which he wavered. He really could have done nothing that would
not have made the matter worse, and he confined himself to speculating
upon the character and history of the man whom he knew only by the
incoherent hearsay of two excited women, and by the brief record of hope
and passion left in the notes which Lily treasured somewhere among the
archives of a young girl's triumphs. He had a morbid curiosity to see
these letters again, but he dared not ask for them; and indeed it would
have been an idle self-indulgence: he remembered them perfectly well.
Seeing Lily so indifferent, it was characteristic of him, in that safety
from consequences which he chiefly loved, that he should tacitly
constitute himself, in some sort, the champion of her rejected suitor,
whose pain he luxuriously fancied in all its different stages and
degrees. His indolent pity even developed into a sort of self-righteous
abhorrence of the girl's hardness. But this was wholly within