e dark days of old Drury's smash,
the few weeks between his partner's dastardly flight and Herbert's own
comment on it in the form of his standing up with Nan for the nuptial
benediction of the Vicar of St. Bernard's on a very cold, bleak December
morning and amid a circle of seven or eight long-faced, red-nosed and
altogether dowdy persons. Poor Nan herself had come to affect him as
scarce other than red-nosed and dowdy by that time, but this only added,
in his then, and indeed in his lasting view, to his general and his
particular morbid bravery. He had cultivated ignorance, there were small
inward immaterial luxuries he could scrap-pily cherish even among other,
and the harshest, destitutions; and one of them was represented by
this easy refusal of his mind to render to certain passages of his
experience, to various ugly images, names, associations, the homage of
continued attention. That served him, that helped him; but what happened
when, a dozen dismal years having worn themselves away, he sat single
and scraped bare again, as if his long wave of misfortune had washed him
far beyond everything and then conspicuously retreated, was that, thus
stranded by tidal action, deposited in the lonely hollow of his fate, he
felt even sustaining pride turn to nought and heard no challenge from
it when old mystifications, stealing forth in the dusk of the day's work
done, scratched at the door of speculation and hung about, through the
idle hours, for irritated notice.

The evenings of his squalid clerkship were all leisure now, but there
was nothing at all near home on the other hand, for his imagination,
numb and stiff from its long chill, to begin to play with. Voices from
far off would quaver to him therefore in the stillness; where he knew
for the most recurrent, little by little, the faint wail of his wife.
He had become deaf to it in life, but at present, after so great an
interval, he listened again, listened and listened, and seemed to hear
it sound as by the pressure of some weak broken spring. It phrased for
his ear her perpetual question, the one she had come to at the last as
under the obsession of a discovered and resented wrong, a wrong withal
that had its source much more in his own action than anywhere else.
"That you didn't make _sure_ she could have done anything, that you
didn't make sure and that you were too afraid!"--this commemoration
had ended by playing such a part of Nan's finally quite contracted
co