reluctance could
come only from that hidden cause of compunction which had prompted her
departure, and which now forced her to sever even the merely material
links between herself and her past.

Amherst, on his return to Hanaford, had tried to find in these
considerations a reason for his deep unrest. It was his wife's course
which still cast a torturing doubt on what he had braced his will to
accept and put behind him. And he now told himself that the perpetual
galling sense of her absence was due to this uneasy consciousness of
what it meant, of the dark secrets it enveloped and held back from him.
In actual truth, every particle of his being missed her, he lacked her
at every turn. She had been at once the partner of his task, and the
_pays bleu_ into which he escaped from it; the vivifying thought which
gave meaning to the life he had chosen, yet never let him forget that
there was a larger richer life outside, to which he was rooted by deeper
and more intrinsic things than any abstract ideal of altruism. His love
had preserved his identity, saved him from shrinking into the mere
nameless unit which the social enthusiast is in danger of becoming
unless the humanitarian passion is balanced, and a little overweighed,
by a merely human one. And now this equilibrium was lost forever, and
his deepest pain lay in realizing that he could not regain it, even by
casting off Westmore and choosing the narrower but richer individual
existence that her love might once have offered. His life was in truth
one indivisible organism, not two halves artificially united. Self and
other-self were ingrown from the roots--whichever portion fate
restricted him to would be but a mutilated half-live fragment of the
whole.

Happily for him, chance made this crisis of his life coincide with a
strike at Westmore. Soon after his return to Hanaford he found himself
compelled to grapple with the hardest problem of his industrial career,
and he was carried through the ensuing three months on that tide of
swift obligatory action that sweeps the ship-wrecked spirit over so many
sunken reefs of fear and despair. The knowledge that he was better able
to deal with the question than any one who might conceivably have taken
his place--this conviction, which was presently confirmed by the
peaceable adjustment of the strike, helped to make the sense of his
immediate usefulness outbalance that other, disintegrating doubt as to
the final value of such effor