“Then how’m I to know! If I died to-morrow I should die not knowing.”
And that night, not knowing, she died.
She died because she had never really known.
II
We never talked about her. It was not my brother’s way. Words hurt him, to speak or to hear them.
He had become more morose than ever, but less irritable, the source of his irritation being gone. Though he plunged into work as another man might have plunged into dissipation, to drown the thought of her, you could see that he had no longer any interest in it; he no longer loved it. He attacked it with a fury that had more hate in it than love. He would spend the greater part of the day and the long evenings shut up in his library, only going out for a short walk an hour before dinner. You could see that soon all spontaneous impulses would be checked in him and he would become the creature of habit and routine.
I tried to rouse him, to shake him up out of his deadly groove; but it was no use. The first effort—for he did make efforts—exhausted him, and he sank back into it again.
But he liked to have me with him; and all the time that I could spare from my housekeeping and gardening I spent in the library. I think he didn’t like to be left alone there in the place where they had the quarrel that killed her; and I noticed that the cause of it, the Token, had disappeared from his table.
And all her things, everything that could remind him of her, had been put away. It was the dead burying its dead.