As he read them a mist came before his eyes, and a sigh escaped him. He understood all that she had suffered here beneath this roof where he had promised her a life of joy. He saw all that she had hidden from him so carefully, through pride and shyness and the cruel humiliation of a love which knew itself powerless to awake response, of a soul which suffered in its innocence all the tortures of the damned. He had lived beside her seeing naught of that piteous conflict; parted from her by the wall built up out of his own indifference and coldness.
Had he even then been able to discern it, it would not have touched him, because of all chill things on earth the dullest is the heart of a man towards a love which he does not desire, which he cannot return. But it reached and touched him now.
The voice from the grave could not fret him as the voice of the living might have done, had he heard it in that pitiful cry of utter loneliness.
Poor timid little verses like nestling birds shivering in the chill winds and pallid sunshine of an unkind spring—across the years they brought her heart to his.
And though he had never loved her, yet in that moment of remorse he would have given all that he possessed, all the lives around him, and all the peace of his own soul, to be able, once to call her back to earth, and once to say to her, 'Child, forgive me.'
But she was dead.
He sat there long in solitude, the dog lying mute at his feet.
He had read the broken, unfinished, humble little verses till their words were in his ear and before his eyes, and in all the sunbeams straying through the golden dust of the air around.
When he rose he laid them gently back where they had been left, with such a touch as a man gives to flowers which he lays on the dead limbs of some dear lost creature. Then he closed the window and went out of the chamber, the dog following him, with slow unwilling footsteps.
There went with him a remorse which would never leave him. For the first time the sense had come upon him that her death had been self-sought, in that sunset hour of the month of hyacinths, when her body had dropped as a stone drops down through the bird-haunted air.