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 —and he certainly hasn't lost his appetite. You wouldn't believe me if I told you how many popovers he ate last night for supper. I must say they were delicious. But he's awfully thin—haven't you noticed?"

"Why, no, he looks just about the same as usual to me."

"Well, he doesn't to me; he makes my heart ache. Of course he's working terribly hard; that may have something to do with it."

She looked at him anxiously that evening, and then turned back relieved to the lamp shade she was covering. He certainly didn't look unhappy. I do believe he is getting over it, she thought.

And all the time he looked so placid, all the time his eyes, quiet behind their spectacles, read the comic strips and the prize-fight accounts, and his hand lifted a cigarette, the feeling of separation, of time going past, fell silently, like snow, on his heart. Time speeding past, time when they should have been together and that could never be lived again, time creeping until he should be with her. Sometimes he was caught between the sense of speed and slowness, as if he were crushed between two turning stones. By day he worked feverishly; at night his tired mind went round in its circle. He knew no peace; he was stretched taut with living. Life had become a series of tense waitings for the mail; nothing was any comfort except her letters to him, the letters to her that he wrote late into the night.