And the mere pang of the parting from it, when one day the hour for parting had surely come, was much more deep and complicated than he could have dreamed.

As in our bodies we become conscious of certain vital centres, certain dependencies of relation and harmony, only when they have suffered shock, so often in life we may go along unconscious of the vital dependencies of our human relationships, till the moment comes to strain or sever them.

Then a thousand hidden nerves quiver at the discovering touch of the knife.

Henry's leaving home, though it had been originally the suggestion of violent feeling, was not to be an actual severance.

His father's "leave my house for ever" had owed something to the rhetoric of anger, and the expulsion and cutting off which it had implied had since been so softened as practically to have disappeared.