They looked straight into each other's eyes.
He bowed deeply. She smiled with an effort at indifference.
"And so she is faded, too," he thought. To be sure, her face still bore the stamp of a simple and severe beauty, but time and grief had dealt ungently with it. The lips were pale and anaemic, two or three folds, sharp as if made with a knife, surrounded them. About the eyes, whose soft and lambent light of other days had turned into a hard and troubled sharpness, spread concentric rings, united by a net-work of veins and wrinkles.
He stood still, lost in thought, and looked after her.
She still trod the earth like a queen, but her outline was detestable.
Only hopelessness bears and attires itself thus.
He calculated. She must be thirty-six. Thirteen years ago he had known her and—loved her? Perhaps….
At least he had left her the evening before their formal betrothal was to take place because her father had dared to remark upon his way of life.
He loved his personal liberty more than his beautiful and wealthy betrothed who clung to him with every fibre of her delicate and noble soul. One word from her, had it been but a word of farewell, would have recalled him. That word remained unspoken.
Thus her life's happiness had been wrecked. Perhaps his, too. What did it matter?