If I
had lived, if by any happy chance I DO live, my only course will be
to maintain the character of a friend until she gives up the past
for the sake of what I can offer. In a certain sense we will be
on equal footing, for her lover is dead and my love is the same as
dead to me. But what is the use of such thoughts! I shall be dead
to them both in a few hours more, and what is far worse, despised
by them both," and for the first time in all that awful vigil bitter
tears rolled down his cheeks.
Then, slowly and minutely, he went over all that had occurred during
that eventful summer. He found a melancholy pleasure which served
to beguile the interminable hours of pain--for now his leg and
unnatural position began to cause very severe suffering--in portraying
to himself the changes in Ida's mind and character from the hour
of their first meeting, and it seemed to him very mysterious indeed
that the thread of his life should have been caught in hers by that
mere casual glance at the concert garden, and then that it should
have been so strangely and intimately woven with hers only to
be snapped at last in this untimely and meaningless fashion. He
groaned, "its all more like the malicious ingenuity of a fiend
seeking to cause the weak human puppets that it misleads the greatest
amount of suffering, than like the hap-hazard of a blind fate, or
the work of a kind and good God.
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