“I am a poor example for a preacher,” said he. “I was spared, it is true; but for what? For what? I am spared to come back to my home to find that it is desolate. Is that your idea of mercy? I tell you that in all that I have passed through, in my hour of deepest misery, in all those terrible days spent in the loneliness of the forest, I never felt so miserable, so lonely, as I did in that house last night. Mercy? It would have been more merciful to me to have let the cobra and the vulture have their way with me; I should have been spared the supreme misery of my life.”
“How you loved him!” she said, after a little pause.
“Loved him! Loved him!” he repeated, as if the words made him impatient with their inadequacy. “And the way we used to talk about what would happen when I returned!”
“Ah! what would happen—yes. I do believe that we also talked about it together.”
“And here I returned to find all changed.”
“All changed? All? You take it for granted that all has changed? that nothing is as you left it? that no one—no feeling remains unchanged?”
She was looking up at him as he stood gazing out of the window.
“Everything has changed for me. I don't know why I came back. I tell you, Agnes, the very sight of the things that were familiar to me long ago only increases my sense of loss—my feeling that nothing here can ever be the same to me.”
“What! that nothing—nothing—can ever be the same to you?”
“That is what I feel.”