And now she had run into an emptiness more final than any words of rejection. He was gone and would make himself a stranger to her for ever.

I suddenly feel . . . as if he might never come. There are 'nevers' in people's lives. People go away, people die, it does happen —

The absence of the loved person is so absolute.

One morning, one day, perhaps soon, she would come to him and find him gone; and she knew how much she did not want to see him die, and yet how much she also wished that he might die holding her hand. These thoughts induced tears, which he must not see; and she tried not to think too much about the terrible mystery which was to be enacted . . .

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

He had lived throughout upon magic, upon romantic love in its fullest sense, and this magic, now that she was gone, seemed sometimes likely to kill him.

How soon we cover up the horror of death and loss, if we can, with almost any sort of explanation, as if we had to justify the very fate which had maimed us.