Good-bye." She pressed my hand again and was gone; and, as I gazed at the empty doorway through which she had passed, I caught a glimpse of her reflection in a glass case on the landing, where she had paused for a moment to wipe her eyes.

I felt it, in a manner, indelicate to have seen her, and turned away my head quickly; and yet I was conscious of a certain selfish satisfaction in the sweet sympathy that her grief bespoke.
But now that she was gone a horrible sense of desolation descended on me.

Only now, by the consciousness of irreparable loss, did I begin to realise the meaning of this passion of love that had stolen unawares into my life.

How it had glorified the present and spread a glamour of delight over the dimly considered future: how all pleasures and desires, all hopes and ambitions, had converged upon it as a focus; how it had stood out as the one great reality behind which the other circumstances of life were as a background, shimmering, half seen, immaterial, and unreal.

And now it was gone--lost, as it seemed, beyond hope; and that which was left to me was but the empty frame from which the picture had vanished.
I have no idea how long I stood rooted to the spot where she had left me, wrapped in a dull consciousness of pain, immersed in a half-numb reverie.