from week to week, month to month, year to year, till at last he
would be taken away to the grave. The grave is dreamless! But there
might be a long time before he reached it, living for years without
seeing or even hearing from her, for she would weary of writing to him.
He began to dream of a hunt, the quarry hearing with dying ears the
horns calling to each other in the distance, and cast in his chair, his
arms hanging like dead arms, his senses mercifully benumbed, he lay, how
long he knew not, but it must have been a long time.

Catherine came into the room with some spoons in her hands, and asked
him what was the matter, and, jumping up, he answered her rudely, for
her curiosity annoyed him. It was irritating to have to wait for her to
leave the room, but he did not dare to begin thinking while she was
there. The door closed at last; he was alone again, and his thoughts
fixed themselves at once on the end of her letter, on the words, 'Go on
with your book, and don't write to me any more--at least, not for the
present. I have too much to do, and cannot attend to a lengthy
correspondence.' The evident cruelty of her words surprised him. There
was nothing like this in any of her other letters. She intended these
words as a _coup de grace_. There was little mercy in them, for they
left him living; he still lived--in a way.

There was no use trying to misunderstand her words. To do so would be
foolish, even if it were possible for him to deceive himself, and the
rest of her letter mattered nothing to him. The two little sentences
with which she dismissed him were his sole concern; they were the keys
to the whole of this correspondence which had beguiled him. Fool that he
had been not to see it! Alas! we see only what we want to see. He
wandered about the lake, trying to bring himself to hate her. He even
stopped in his walks to address insulting words to her. Words of common
abuse came to his tongue readily, but there was an unconquerable
tenderness in his heart always; and one day the thought went by that it
was nobler of her to make him suffer than to have meekly forgiven him,
as many women would have done, because he was a priest. He stopped
affrighted, and began to wonder if this were the first time her easy
forgiveness of his mistake had seemed suspicious. No, he felt sure that
some sort of shadow of disappointment had passed at the back of his mind
when he read her first letter, and after having lain for months