They mercifully took it for granted that matters must have gone wrong there, or else he would speak about them, for there had been some gay banter among them concerning the objects of his expedition before he left home.  They had heard of the heroine of his Class Day, and they had their doubts of her, such as girls have of their brothers’ heroines.  They were not inconsolably sorry to have her prove unkind; and their mother found in the probable event another proof of their father’s total want of discernment where women were concerned, for the elder Mavering had come home from Class Day about as much smitten with this mysterious Miss Pasmer as Dan was.  She talked it over indignantly with her daughters; they were glad of Dan’s escape, but they were incensed with the girl who could let him escape, and they inculpated her in a high degree of heartless flirtation.  They knew how sweet Dan was, and they believed him most sincere and good.  He had been brilliantly popular in college, and he was as bright as he could be.  What was it she chose not to like in him?  They vexed themselves with asking how or in what way she thought herself better.  They would not have had her love Dan, but they were hot against her for not loving him.

They did not question him, but they tried in every way to find out how much he was hurt, and they watched him in every word and look for signs of change to better or worse, with a growing belief that he was not very much hurt.

It could not be said that in three weeks he forgot Alice, or had begun to forget her; but he had begun to reconcile himself to his fate, as people do in their bereavements by death.  His consciousness habituated itself to the facts as something irretrievable.  He no longer framed in his mind situations in which the past was restored.  He knew that he should never love again, but he had moments, and more and more of them, in which he experienced that life had objects besides love.  There were times when he tingled with all the anguish of the first moment of his rejection, when he stopped in whatever he was doing, or stood stock-still, as a man does when arrested by a physical pang, breathless, waiting.  There were other times when he went about steeped in gloom so black that all the world darkened with it, and some mornings when he woke he wished that the night had lasted for ever, and felt as if the daylight had uncovered his misery and his shame to every one.  He never knew when he should have these moods, and he thought he should have them as long as he lived.  He thought this would be something rather fine.  He had still other moods, in which he saw an old man with a grey moustache, like Colonel Newcome, meeting a beautiful white-haired lady; the man had never married, and he had not seen this lady for fifty years.  He bent over, and kissed her hand.