There had been a time when, in the young pathos of things, he would shut his eyes that the sunset might not wound him so sore; now, as he rode homeward into the fronting sunset, he felt nothing, cared for nothing, only ached with a dull aching through body and soul.  He was still kind to his fellows, but the glow of the kindness had vanished, and truest thanks hardly waked the slightest thrill.

He very seldom saw Wingfold now, and less than ever was inclined toward his doctrine; for had it not been through him this misery had come upon him?  Had he not, with the confidence of all the sciences, uttered the merest dreams as eternal truths?  How could poor Juliet help supposing he knew the things he asserted, and taking them for facts?  The human heart was the one unreasonable thing, sighing ever after that which is not!  Sprung from nothing, it yet desired a creator!—­at least some hearts did so:  his did not; he knew better!

There was of course no reason in this.  Was the thing not a fact which she had confessed? was he not a worshiper of fact? did he not even dignify it with the name of truth? and could he wish his wife had kept the miserable fact to herself, leaving him to his fools’-paradise of ignorance?  Why then should he feel resentment against the man whose teaching had only compelled her to confess it?—­But the thing was out of the realm of science and its logic.

Sometimes he grew fierce, and determined to face every possible agony, endure all, and dominate his misery; but ever and anon it returned with its own disabling sickness, bringing the sense of the unendurable.  Of his own motion he saw nobody except in his practice.  He studied hard, even to weariness and faintness, contrived strange experiments, and caught, he believed, curious peeps into the house of life.  Upon them he founded theories as wild as they were daring, and hob-nobbed with death and corruption.  But life is at the will of the Maker, and misery can not kill it.  By degrees a little composure returned, and the old keen look began to revive.  But there were wrinkles on the forehead that had hitherto been smooth as ivory; furrows, the dry water-courses of sorrow, appeared on his cheeks, and a few silvery threads glinted in his hair.  His step was heavy, and his voice had lost its ring—­the cheer was out of it.  He no more obtruded his opinions, for, as I have said, he shrunk from all interchange, but he held to them as firmly as ever.  He was not to be driven from the truth by suffering!  But there was a certain strange movement in his spirit of which he took no note—­a feeling of resentment, as if against a God that yet did not exist, for making upon him the experiment whether he might not, by oppression, be driven to believe in Him.

When Dorothy knew of his return, and his ways began to show that he intended living just as before his marriage, the time seemed come for telling Juliet of the accident and his recovery from the effects of it.  She went into violent hysterics, and the moment she could speak, blamed Dorothy bitterly for not having told her before.