"But if you wish to know, I miss something." So much she owned.

She missed something, and she knew very well what it was that she missed.

Even as Chayne in his Sussex home had ached to know that the house lacked a particular presence, so it began to be with Sylvia in Dorsetshire.
"Yet he has been absent for a longer time," she argued with herself, "and I have not missed him.

Indeed, I have been glad of his absence." And the answer came quickly from her thoughts.
"At any time you could have called him to your side, and you knew it.

Now you have sent him away for always." During the week the sense of loss, the feeling that everything was unbearably incomplete, grew stronger and stronger within her.