t was
grateful to Bessy for having dismissed her visitors--partly to please
him, as he guessed--yet he found the routine of the establishment more
oppressive than when the house was full. If he could have been alone
with her in a quiet corner--the despised cottage at Westmore, even!--he
fancied they might still have been brought together by restricted space
and the familiar exigencies of life. All the primitive necessities which
bind together, through their recurring daily wants, natures fated to
find no higher point of union, had been carefully eliminated from the
life at Lynbrook, where material needs were not only provided for but
anticipated by a hidden mechanism that filled the house with the
perpetual sense of invisible attendance. Though Amherst knew that he and
Bessy could never meet in the region of great issues, he thought he
might have regained the way to her heart, and found relief from his own
inaction, in the small ministrations of daily life; but the next moment
he smiled to picture Bessy in surroundings where the clocks were not
wound of themselves and the doors did not fly open at her approach.
Those thick-crowding cares and drudgeries which serve as merciful
screens between so many discordant natures would have been as
intolerable to her as was to Amherst the great glare of leisure in which
he and she were now confronted.

He saw that Bessy was in the state of propitiatory eagerness which
always followed on her gaining a point in their long duel; and he could
guess that she was tremulously anxious not only to make up to him, by
all the arts she knew, for the sacrifice she had exacted, but also to
conceal from every one the fact that, as Mr. Langhope bluntly put it, he
had been "brought to terms." Amherst was touched by her efforts, and
half-ashamed of his own inability to respond to them. But his mind,
released from its normal preoccupations, had become a dangerous
instrument of analysis and disintegration, and conditions which, a few
months before, he might have accepted with the wholesome tolerance of
the busy man, now pressed on him unendurably. He saw that he and his
wife were really face to face for the first time since their marriage.
Hitherto something had always intervened between them--first the spell
of her grace and beauty, and the brief joy of her participation in his
work; then the sorrow of their child's death, and after that the
temporary exhilaration of carrying out his ideas at Westmor