He knew that he was cruel, but he had no relenting in him yet.
After he had done speaking, he still moved about, half in absence
of mind, and Rosamond sat perfectly still. At length Will, seeming to
bethink himself, took up his hat, yet stood some moments irresolute.
He had spoken to her in a way that made a phrase of common politeness
difficult to utter; and yet, now that he had come to the point
of going away from her without further speech, he shrank from it
as a brutality; he felt checked and stultified in his anger.
He walked towards the mantel-piece and leaned his arm on it,
and waited in silence for--he hardly knew what. The vindictive fire
was still burning in him, and he could utter no word of retractation;
but it was nevertheless in his mind that having come back to this
hearth where he had enjoyed a caressing friendship he had found.
calamity seated there--he had had suddenly revealed to him a trouble
that lay outside the home as well as within it. And what seemed
a foreboding was pressing upon him as with slow pincers:--that his
life might come to be enslaved by this helpless woman who had thrown
herself upon him in the dreary sadness of her heart. But he was
in gloomy rebellion against the fact that his quick apprehensiveness
foreshadowed to him, and when his eyes fell on Rosamond's blighted
face it seemed to him that he was the more pitiable of the two;
for pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can
turn into compassion.
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