ded silently out of the room, and he sank back
again in the corner of the sofa, helplessly giving himself up, in the
loneliness and darkness, to his bitter anguish.

CHAPTER VIII.

So he had lost her--his brave little wife, his good comrade, the friend
who sympathized with all his moods and thoughts, all his feelings and
wishes! The right hand must do without the left, the complete man had
become a pitiful fragment, a crumbling mass of ruin.

The blow was so sudden, so unexpected, that for the first hour his
bewilderment swallowed up all sense of pain. If anything earthly had
ever seemed positive and secure from loss, it had been the possession
of this heart. The secret fear (which sometimes blends with the joy of
passionate love,) that exuberance of feeling may fall from its
exaltation and undergo the common lot of change, he had never known. He
had never toiled in anxiety and doubt to win the woman's love; it had
been his long before he suspected it; why should he fancy that it could
ever change! And now she had deserted him!

No feeling of reproach or bitterness, that she failed him now when he
needed her more than ever, rose in his heart. He esteemed her too
highly to believe her capable of any petty irritability, any ordinary
feminine weakness, such as going "to make herself missed." If she could
feel that her place was no longer beside him, she must have had good
reasons for her belief, reasons which would bear the examination not
only of her sorely tried heart, but of her reason. What they might be,
well as he knew her, was not clear to him. Did she not know him too,
and know he would never leave her? But he also knew whom she had seen,
and that this visitor had been the cause of her sudden resolution he
was perfectly convinced.

But however that might be--he had lost her. True--in the midst of his
deep sorrow, a voice within whispered consolingly it was not possible,
not conceivable that he could have lost her forever. If she had
suspected that he would return to her to-day, how desolate the lonely
house would seem, how sleepless the night would be--perhaps she would
have remained. And it could have needed only one word, one look into
each other's eyes, to have banished all the ghosts that had come
between them. But even if she returned with him--he missed her to-day,
and had been longing all day to see her, as he had never done before,
and only endured the weary hours,