He had loved, and lost, and despaired.

Beside those great experiences how trivial and evanescent seemed all the interests of the life that went before them! He looked back over his intercourse with Isabel Bretherton, and the points upon which it had turned seemed so remote from him, so insignificant, that for the moment he could hardly realise them.

The artistic and aesthetic questions which had seemed to him so vital six months before had faded almost out of view in the fierce neighbourhood of sorrow and passion.

His first relation to her had been that of one who knows to one who is ignorant; but that puny link had dropped, and he was going to meet her now, fresh from the presence of death, loving her as a man loves a woman, and claiming from her nothing but pity for his grief, balm for his wound,--the answer of human tenderness to human need.
How strange and sad that she should be still in ignorance of his loss and hers! In the early morning after Marie's death, when he woke up from a few heavy hours of sleep, his mind had been full of her.

How was the news to be broken to her?
He himself did not feel that he could leave his brother-in-law.