As for the long nightmare day he had lived
through, it had been too full for much deliberate thinking; and he wanted
to plan for the future: how to begin again, and how to keep the woman who
had come to mean more for him than anything else had ever meant--more, he
knew, than anything else could mean.
He was not sure whether the love in his heart was a punishment or a
blessing, but there it was. It had come to stay.
"This woman to this man!"
He found himself repeating the words he remembered best in the marriage
service, not bitterly as he had repeated them to Annesley, but
yearningly, clingingly, groping after some promise of hope in them.
"She gave herself to me. I'm the same man she loved, after all, though
she says I'm not," he told himself. "God! What's the good of being a man
at all, if I can't get her back?"
As he wandered through one winter-saddened garden after another--the
Italian garden, the Dutch garden, the rose garden--he searched his soul,
asking it how much more he should have to tell the girl about his past.
In a kind of desperate resignation he persuaded himself that there was
nothing he would not be willing to tell her now, if it were for her good,
and if she wished to hear.
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