And this was the
more strange in that I never doubted the strength of his attachment; it
remained engrossing and unchanged, the largest part of his life. No alien
shadow had ever come between him and the memory of the little girl with
the violet eyes, to whom he at least was bound. But a shadow was there;
fantastic it seemed to me at first, too grotesque to be met with argument,
but in whose very lack of substance, as I came to see, lay its ultimate
strength. The notion of the woman, which now she was, came between him and
the girl whom he had loved, whom he still loved with passion, and separated
them. It was only on our voyage home, when we walked the deck together
interminably during the hot, sleepless nights, that he first revealed to me
without subterfuge, the slow agony by which this phantom slew him. And his
old bitter conviction of the malignity of his luck, which had lain dormant
in the first flush of his material prosperity, returned to him. The
apparent change in it seemed to him just then, the last irony of those
hostile powers which had pursued him.
'It came to me suddenly,' he said, 'just before I left Agnas, when I had
been adding up my pile and saw there was nothing to keep me, that it was
all wrong.
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