so hungry for the sound to come again that
he was conscious of no other desire left in life. She had gone without
speaking; abruptly a chasm had been cut in his course, down which the
tide of his being plunged in disorder; fell upon rocks; flung itself to
destruction. The distress had an effect of physical ruin and disaster.
He trembled; he was white; he felt exhausted, as if by a great physical
effort. He sank at last into a chair standing opposite her empty one,
and marked, mechanically, with his eye upon the clock, how she went
farther and farther from him, was home now, and now, doubtless, again
with Rodney. But it was long before he could realize these facts; the
immense desire for her presence churned his senses into foam, into
froth, into a haze of emotion that removed all facts from his grasp, and
gave him a strange sense of distance, even from the material shapes of
wall and window by which he was surrounded. The prospect of the future,
now that the strength of his passion was revealed to him, appalled him.

The marriage would take place in September, she had said; that allowed
him, then, six full months in which to undergo these terrible extremes
of emotion. Six months of torture, and after that the silence of the
grave, the isolation of the insane, the exile of the damned; at best, a
life from which the chief good was knowingly and for ever excluded. An
impartial judge might have assured him that his chief hope of recovery
lay in this mystic temper, which identified a living woman with much
that no human beings long possess in the eyes of each other; she would
pass, and the desire for her vanish, but his belief in what she stood
for, detached from her, would remain. This line of thought offered,
perhaps, some respite, and possessed of a brain that had its station
considerably above the tumult of the senses, he tried to reduce the
vague and wandering incoherency of his emotions to order. The sense of
self-preservation was strong in him, and Katharine herself had strangely
revived it by convincing him that his family deserved and needed all his
strength. She was right, and for their sake, if not for his own, this
passion, which could bear no fruit, must be cut off, uprooted, shown
to be as visionary and baseless as she had maintained. The best way of
achieving this was not to run away from her, but to face her, and having
steeped himself in her qualities, to convince his reason that they were,
as she assured hi