grew sullen; he became fixed in
the resolve to hold entirely apart and doggedly await the issue.

At the end of each month he sent half the money he had received from
Carter, simply enclosing postal orders in an envelope addressed to his
wife. The first two remittances were in no way acknowledged; the third
brought a short note from Amy:

'As you continue to send these sums of money, I had perhaps better let
you know that I cannot use them for any purposes of my own. Perhaps a
sense of duty leads you to make this sacrifice, but I am afraid it
is more likely that you wish to remind me every month that you are
undergoing privations, and to pain me in this way. What you have sent I
have deposited in the Post Office Savings' Bank in Willie's name, and I
shall continue to do so.--A.R.'

For a day or two Reardon persevered in an intention of not replying, but
the desire to utter his turbid feelings became in the end too strong. He
wrote:

'I regard it as quite natural that you should put the worst
interpretation on whatever I do. As for my privations, I think very
little of them; they are a trifle in comparison with the thought that
I am forsaken just because my pocket is empty. And I am far indeed from
thinking that you can be pained by whatever I may undergo; that would
suppose some generosity in your nature.'

This was no sooner posted than he would gladly have recalled it. He knew
that it was undignified, that it contained as many falsehoods as lines,
and he was ashamed of himself for having written so. But he could not
pen a letter of retractation, and there remained with him a new cause of
exasperated wretchedness.

Excepting the people with whom he came in contact at the hospital, he
had no society but that of Biffen. The realist visited him once a
week, and this friendship grew closer than it had been in the time of
Reardon's prosperity. Biffen was a man of so much natural delicacy, that
there was a pleasure in imparting to him the details of private sorrow;
though profoundly sympathetic, he did his best to oppose Reardon's
harsher judgments of Amy, and herein he gave his friend a satisfaction
which might not be avowed.

'I really do not see,' he exclaimed, as they sat in the garret one night
of midsummer, 'how your wife could have acted otherwise. Of course I
am quite unable to judge the attitude of her mind, but I think, I can't
help thinking, from what I knew of her, that there has been strictly a
misunde