p
the toadflax blossoms and stuck them in water again--her last tribute to
the memory of Ishmael.

CHAPTER XVI

THE GREY WORLD

During the next few months pain became a habit of mind with
Ishmael, a habit which was to grow into a blessing for him, preventing
him ever again feeling with such acuteness. From time to time he fell
into deadness of all sensation, when he hoped that the worst of his
suffering was over; but always it struggled up out of the numbness
again, as insistent as before. He fought his lassitude of spirit as
stubbornly as the periods of active pain, but both with the same result,
the opposition probably only making both last the longer. He would
doubtless have pulled through more quickly if he had gone away, joined
Killigrew in Paris, or gone on some tour with Boase. But partly from a
stubborn sense of not deserting his post, partly because things were not
doing well in the farming world just then, and partly because of the
true instinct of the lover which bids him stay where the feet of his
mistress have passed, though the suffering thereby be doubled, he stayed
on at Cloom. At Cloom--where there was no evading the thought of her
amid the memories, where every stile and field held some fragrance from
what he had thought her, where the very air that blew across his brow
seemed as though it blew from her. If he had left he would have had to
take with him the image of her as he now knew her; by staying he kept
the ghost of the Blanche he had imagined her to be when she was still
there.

There was a long time when it suddenly seemed to him as though she must
repent, as though he could not be suffering so and she not share it, as
though any post might bring a letter and any moment show her figure
pausing at the gate. He learnt during that phase what poignancy is held
by the cry of the wisest of men--that "hope deferred maketh the heart
sick." During the weeks that he was thus obsessed there was not a click
of the latch but sent his heart racing, while at the same time he did
not dare look up because in his heart he knew it would not be she he
saw. He slept little during this period, and looked a good six or seven
years older than his real age. This was succeeded by one of the phases
of numbness when partly reaction, because the mind cannot keep stretched
too tautly, and partly sheer physical fatigue from the hard work he
drove himself to every day, made for a merciful slough of the spirit in