In her story she had come to what, in truth, had been the determining and formative influence on her own life--her father's melancholy, and the mystery in which it had been enwrapped; and even the perceptions of love were for the moment blinded as the old tyrannous grief overshadowed her.
"His life"-- she said, slowly--"seemed for years--one long struggle to bear--what was really--unbearable.

Then when I was about nineteen there was a change.

He no longer shunned people quite in the same way, and he took me to Egypt and India.

We came across old friends of his whom I, of course, had never seen before; and I used to wonder at the way in which they treated him--with a kind of reverence--as though they would not have touched him roughly for the world.

Then directly after we got home to the Riviera his illness began--" She dwelt on the long days of dumbness, and her constant sense that he wished--in vain--to communicate something to her.
"He wanted something--and I could not give it him--could not even tell what it was.