The fact of his taking that train, of his travelling so
straight and far away from her, gave to what had happened
the implacable outline of reality. He was gone; he would
not come back; and her life had ended just as she had
dreamed it was beginning. She had no doubt, at first, as to
the absolute inevitability of this conclusion. The man who
had driven away from her house in the autumn dawn was not
the man she had loved; he was a stranger with whom she had
not a single thought in common. It was terrible, indeed,
that he wore the face and spoke in the voice of her friend,
and that, as long as he was under one roof with her, the
mere way in which he moved and looked could bridge at a
stroke the gulf between them. That, no doubt, was the fault
of her exaggerated sensibility to outward things: she was
frightened to see how it enslaved her. A day or two before
she had supposed the sense of honour was her deepest
sentiment: if she had smiled at the conventions of others it
was because they were too trivial, not because they were too
grave. There were certain dishonours with which she had
never dreamed that any pact could be made: she had had an
incorruptible passion for good faith and fairness.

She had supposed that, once Darrow was gone, once she was
safe from the danger of seeing and hearing him, this high
devotion would sustain her. She had believed it would be
possible to separate the image of the man she had thought
him from that of the man he was. She had even foreseen the
hour when she might raise a mournful shrine to the memory of
the Darrow she had loved, without fear that his double's