In the interval he had kept away from the church, and he needed no fresh assurance from her to know she hadn't entered it.

The change was complete enough: it had broken up her life.
Indeed it had broken up his, for all the fires of his shrine seemed to him suddenly to have been quenched.

A great indifference fell upon him, the weight of which was in itself a pain; and he never knew what his devotion had been for him till in that shock it ceased like a dropped watch.

Neither did he know with how large a confidence he had counted on the final service that had now failed: the mortal deception was that in this abandonment the whole future gave way.
These days of her absence proved to him of what she was capable; all the more that he never dreamed she was vindictive or even resentful.

It was not in anger she had forsaken him; it was in simple submission to hard reality, to the stern logic of life.