Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/233

Rh she was pining for the Lover who had inherited heart disease.

"I suppose it was you who saw him, by the way," said he, "a tall, well-set-up young fellow—dark—not bad looking."

"I—I don't remember," lied the Onlooker, with the eyes of his memory on the white face of the man he had stabbed.

Now the Lover and the Onlooker had each his own burden to bear. And the Lover's was the easier. He worked still, though there was now nothing to work for more; he worked as he had never worked in his life, because he knew that if he did not take to work he should take to drink or worse devils, and he set his teeth and swore that her Lover should not be degraded. He knew that she loved him, and there was a kind of fierce pain-pleasure—like that of scratching a sore—in the thought that she was as wretched as he was, that, divided in all else, they were yet united in their suffering. He thought it made him more miserable to know of her misery. But it didn't. He never saw her, but he dreamed of her, and sometimes the dreams got out of hand, and carried him a thousand worlds from all that