The recognition of this, as regarded Dr.Leete and his amiable wife, however painful, I might have endured, but the conviction that Edith must share their feeling was more than I could bear.
The crushing effect with which this belated perception of a fact so obvious came to me opened my eyes fully to something which perhaps the reader has already suspected,--I loved Edith.
Was it strange that I did?
The affecting occasion on which our intimacy had begun, when her hands had drawn me out of the whirlpool of madness; the fact that her sympathy was the vital breath which had set me up in this new life and enabled me to support it; my habit of looking to her as the mediator between me and the world around in a sense that even her father was not,--these were circumstances that had predetermined a result which her remarkable loveliness of person and disposition would alone have accounted for.

It was quite inevitable that she should have come to seem to me, in a sense quite different from the usual experience of lovers, the only woman in this world.

Now that I had become suddenly sensible of the fatuity of the hopes I had begun to cherish, I suffered not merely what another lover might, but in addition a desolate loneliness, an utter forlornness, such as no other lover, however unhappy, could have felt.
My hosts evidently saw that I was depressed in spirits, and did their best to divert me.

Edith especially, I could see, was distressed for me, but according to the usual perversity of lovers, having once been so mad as to dream of receiving something more from her, there was no longer any virtue for me in a kindness that I knew was only sympathy.
Toward nightfall, after secluding myself in my room most of the afternoon, I went into the garden to walk about.

The day was overcast, with an autumnal flavor in the warm, still air.