For it never came to Emily as the faintest whisper that other love than Wilfrid's might bless her life.
That was constancy which nothing could shake; in this she would never fall from the ideal she had set before herself.

She no longer tried to banish thoughts of what she had lost; Wilfrid was a companion at all hours far more real than the people with whom she had to associate.

She had, alas, destroyed his letters she had destroyed the book in which she wrote the secrets of her heart that he might some day read them.

The lack of a single thing that had come to her from him made the more terribly real the severance of his life from hers.

She anguished without hope.
Then there came to her the knowledge that her bodily strength was threatened by disease.