Because it was not in his power to hold her. Even if he had followed a certain wild, hateful impulse which bade him keep her, even by means of locked doors and imprisonment, he would have held but the husk of her. The lonely spirit which animated her, which was the thing he loved, and met for the first time, would not have been there in her prison, but away with the child she loved. His success would have been sheer failure.
Whereas now, deep in his heart, not to be completely annihilated, lurked the faint hope that his present failure might possibly, by some scarcely conceivable good fortune, turn into success.
The miles flew past unnoticed, while he sat rapt within himself. As the car came to a standstill before the dark porch of Omberleigh, he was reflecting upon the strangeness of the fact that he had once thought Virginia's resemblance to her mother so striking.
Already she had almost ceased to remind him of his former bitterness. A wholly new image of her had grown up in his heart. Before it for the last weeks he had been burning incense. He had placed it in a sacred niche upon a pedestal.
To-night he had taken it out. He wanted to hold it in his arms, to make it his.
What if it failed to pass the almost superhuman test which he had devised for it?
CHAPTER XIX
ABSENCE
"My whole life is so strange: as strange
It is, my husband, whom I have not wronged,
Should hate and harm me."—The Ring and the Book.