." and now the thought made her feel less
alone. The expression of his face was stern and yet tender: for the
first time she understood what he had suffered.

She had no doubt as to the necessity of giving him up, but it was
impossible to tell him so then. She stood up and said: "I'll leave you
to your letters." He made no protest, but merely answered: "You'll come
down presently for a walk?" and it occurred to her at once that she
would walk down to the river with him, and give herself for the last
time the tragic luxury of sitting at his side in the little pavilion.
"Perhaps," she thought, "it will be easier to tell him there."

It did not, on the way home from their walk, become any easier to tell
him; but her secret decision to do so before he left gave her a kind
of factitious calm and laid a melancholy ecstasy upon the hour. Still
skirting the subject that fanned their very faces with its flame, they
clung persistently to other topics, and it seemed to Anna that their
minds had never been nearer together than in this hour when their hearts
were so separate. In the glow of interchanged love she had grown less
conscious of that other glow of interchanged thought which had once
illumined her mind. She had forgotten how Darrow had widened her world
and lengthened out all her perspectives, and with a pang of double
destitution she saw herself alone among her shrunken thoughts.

For the first time, then, she had a clear vision of what her life would
be without him. She imagined herself trying to take up the daily round,
and all that had lightened and animated it seemed equally lifeless and
vain. She tried to think of herself as wholly absorbed in her daughter's
development, like other mothers she had seen; but she supposed those
mothers must have had stored memories of happiness to nourish them. She
had had nothing, and all her starved youth still claimed its due.

When she went up to dress for dinner she said to herself: "I'll have
my last evening with him, and then, before we say good night, I'll tell
him."

This postponement did not seem unjustified. Darrow had shown her how
he dreaded vain words, how resolved he was to avoid all fruitless
discussion. He must have been intensely aware of what had been going on
in her mind since his return, yet when she had attempted to reveal it
to him he had turned from the revelation. She was therefore merely
following the line he had traced in behaving, till the final moment