There was something inexpressibly mournful in this lonely pilgrimage of the dismantled mansion.

Yet there was no show of cheap emotion by Jean Jacques; and a wave of the hand prevented any one from following him in his dry-eyed progress to say farewell to these haunts of childhood, manhood, family, and home.

There was a strange numbness in his mind and body, and he had a feeling that he moved immense and reflective among material things.

Only tragedy can produce that feeling.
Happiness makes the universe infinite and stupendous, despair makes it small and even trivial.
It was when he had reached the little office where he had done the business of his life--a kind of neutral place where he had ever isolated himself from the domestic scene--that the final sensation, save one, of his existence at the Manor came to him.

Virginie Poucette had divined his purpose when he began the tour of the house, and going by a roundabout way, she had placed herself where she could speak with him alone before he left the place for ever--if that was to be.