walls that
sheltered him looked on him as a stranger; she alone had turned the same
mild gentle look upon him always. Yes, to the latest and the last. She
had never changed to him--nor had he ever changed to her--and she was
lost.

As, one by one, they fell away before his mind--his baby--hope, his
wife, his friend, his fortune--oh how the mist, through which he had
seen her, cleared, and showed him her true self! Oh, how much better
than this that he had loved her as he had his boy, and lost her as he
had his boy, and laid them in their early grave together!

In his pride--for he was proud yet--he let the world go from him freely.
As it fell away, he shook it off. Whether he imagined its face as
expressing pity for him, or indifference to him, he shunned it alike. It
was in the same degree to be avoided, in either aspect. He had no idea
of any one companion in his misery, but the one he had driven away. What
he would have said to her, or what consolation submitted to receive from
her, he never pictured to himself. But he always knew she would have
been true to him, if he had suffered her. He always knew she would have
loved him better now, than at any other time; he was as certain that it
was in her nature, as he was that there was a sky above him; and he sat
thinking so, in his loneliness, from hour to hour. Day after day uttered
this speech; night after night showed him this knowledge.

It began, beyond all doubt (however slow it advanced for some time), in
the receipt of her young husband's letter, and the certainty that she
was gone. And yet--so proud he was in his ruin, or so reminiscent of
her only as something that might have been his, but was lost beyond
redemption--that if he could have heard her voice in an adjoining room,
he would not have gone to her. If he could have seen her in the street,
and she had done no more than look at him as she had been used to look,
he would have passed on with his old cold unforgiving face, and not
addressed her, or relaxed it, though his heart should have broken soon
afterwards. However turbulent his thoughts, or harsh his anger had been,
at first, concerning her marriage, or her husband, that was all past
now. He chiefly thought of what might have been, and what was not. What
was, was all summed up in this: that she was lost, and he bowed down
with sorrow and remorse.

And now he felt that he had had two children born to him in that house,
and that between him and the ba