Page:Maud Howe - A Newport Aquarelle.djvu/137

 our loves and our hates, in the peace of all this beauty?"

She spoke half to herself and half to the bird. Larkington knew that he was not addressed. He felt a terrible sense of loneliness. He was with the woman he loved, close at her side. He had carried her in his arms but now, and yet she was farther from him at that moment than she had ever seemed before.

With the feeling of this distance there came to him a great pain unknown before. What it meant he could not know. If one had told him, he could not have understood the words. He suffered dumbly, ignorantly, with a new sense of his capacity for suffering.

Poor wretch! Miserable sham, impostor, and liar,—false to all men and women, false to himself; in that keen suffering awoke within him the soul which had till now slept.