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.
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