That he should ever cease to love her was impossible; but it seemed to him that a chivalrous friendship for her, a disinterested brotherly affection, was in no manner incompatible with that hapless silent love.

No word of his, in all their intercourse to come, should ever remind her of that hidden devotion; no shadow of the past should ever cloud the calm brightness of the present.
It was a romantic fancy, perhaps, for a man of business, whose days were spent in the very press and tumult of commercial life; but it had lifted Gilbert Fenton out of that slough of despond into which he had fallen when Marian seemed utterly lost to him--vanished altogether out of his existence.
He had a sense of bitter disappointment, therefore, when he found that she had gone, leaving neither letter nor message for him.

How little value his friendship must needs possess for her, when she could abandon him thus without a word! He had felt sure that she would consult him upon her affairs; but no, she had her husband to whom to appeal, and had no need of any other counsellor.
"I was a fool to think that I could ever be anything to her, even a friend," he said to himself bitterly; "women are incapable of friendship.
It is all or nothing with them; a blind self-abnegation or the coldest indifference.

Devotion cannot touch them, unless the man who gives it happen to be that one man out of a thousand who has the power to bewitch their senses.

Truth and affection, of themselves, have no value with them.