They parted.
And now the Onlooker dared not meet her—dared not call at the house as he had used to do. At last—the father pressed him—he went. He met her. And it was as though he had met the ghost of her whom he had loved. Her eyes had blue marks under them, her chin had grown more pointed, her nose sharper. There was a new line on her forehead, and her eyes had changed.
Over the wine he heard from the father that 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 lay between them. Then he had to wake up. And that was bad.
But the Onlooker was no dreamer, and he saw her about three times a week. He saw how the light of life that his lying lips had blown out was not to be rekindled by his or any man's breath. He saw her slenderness turn to thinness, the pure, healthy pallor of her rounded cheek change to a sickly white, covering a clear-cut mask of set endurance. And there was no work that could shut out that sight—no temptation of the world, the flesh, or the devil to give him even the relief of a fight. He had no temptations; he had never had but the one. His soul was naked to the bitter wind of the actual; and the days went by, went by, and every day he knew more and more surely that he had lied and thrown away his soul, and that the wages of sin were death, and no other thing whatever. And gradually, little by little, the whole worth of life seemed to lie in the faint, far chance of his being able to undo the one triumphantly impulsive and unreasoning action of his life.
But there are some acts that there is no undoing. And the hell that had burned in his heart so fiercely when he had seen her in the other man's arms burned now with new bright lights and infernal flickering flame tongues.
And at last, out of hell, the Onlooker reached out his hands and caught at prayer. He caught at it as a drowning man catches at a white gleam in the black of the surging sea about him—it may be a painted spar, it may be empty foam. The Onlooker prayed.
And that very evening he ran up against the Lover at the Temple Station, and he got into the same carriage with him.