Alas, when the night of that very day came he found
his little store exhausted, and he and the companion of his life sat
together for a quarter of an hour or more without speaking a word.
He proposed reading a book, and took up the Ferguson, thinking he
could extract from it something which might interest her; but she was
so irresponsive, and evidently cared so little for it, that he
ceased. It was but eight o'clock, and how to fill up the time he did
not know. At last he said he would just take a turn outside and look
at the weather. He went out and stood under the stars of which he
had been reading. The meeting, after such a separation, was scarcely
twenty-four hours old, and yet he felt once more the old weariness
and the old inability to profit by her society or care for it. He
wished, or half wished, that there might have existed such
differences between them that they could have totally disregarded or
even hated one another. The futility, however, of any raving was
soon perfectly clear to him. He might as well have strained at a
chain which held him fast by the leg, and he therefore strove to
quiet himself. He came back, after being absent longer than he
intended and found she was upstairs.
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