Nicholas had gone straight home, neither speaking to nor seeing a soul.  From that hour a change seemed to come over him.  He had ever a full share of self-consciousness; he had been readily , had shown an unusual of being personally .  But now his sense of self, as an individual provoking opinion, appeared to leave him.  When, therefore, after a day or two of , he came again, and the few acquaintances he had formed in the town with him on what had happened, and pitied his haggard looks, he did not shrink from their regard as he would have done , but took their sympathy as it would have been accepted by a child.  
It reached his ears that Bellston had not appeared on the evening of his arrival at any hotel in the town or neighbourhood, or entered his wife’s house at all.  ‘That’s a part of his cruelty,’ thought Nicholas.  And when two or three days had passed, and still no account came to him of Bellston having joined her, he ventured to set out for Froom-Everard.
 
Christine was so shaken that she was obliged to receive him as she lay on a sofa, beside the square table which was to have borne their evening feast.  She her eyes wistfully upon him, and smiled a sad smile.
 
‘He has not come?’ said Nicholas under his breath.
 
‘He has not.’
 
Then Nicholas sat beside her, and they talked on general topics merely like saddened old friends.  But they could not keep away the subject of Bellston, their voices dropping as it forced its way in.  Christine, no less than Nicholas, knowing her husband’s character, inferred that, having stopped her game, as he would have phrased it, he was taking things , and, finding nothing very attractive in her limited mode of living, was meaning to return to her only when he had nothing better to do.
 
The bolt which laid low their hopes had struck so recently that they could hardly look each other in the face when speaking that day.  But when a week or two had passed, and all the horizon still remained as vacant of Bellston as before, Nicholas and she could talk of the event with calm wonderment.  Why had he come, to go again like this?
 
And then there set in a period of resigned , during which
 
So like, so very like, was day to day,
 
that to tell of one of them is to tell of all.  Nicholas would arrive between three and four in the afternoon, a faint influencing his walk as he neared her door.  He would knock; she would always reply in person, having watched for him from the window.  Then he would whisper—‘He has not come?’
 
‘He has not,’ she would say.
 
Nicholas would enter then, and she being ready , they would walk into the Sallows together as far as to the spot which they had frequently made their place of appointment in their youthful days.  A bridge, which Bellston had caused to be thrown over the stream during his residence with her in the -house, was now again removed, and all was just the same as in Nicholas’s time, when he had been accustomed to across on the edge of the and come up to her like a merman from the deep.  Here on the felled trunk, which still lay rotting in its old place, they would now sit, gazing at the sheet of water, with its never-ending at their baffled attempts to make themselves one flesh.  Returning to the house they would sit down together to tea, after which, and the chat that accompanied it, he walked home by the declining light.  This became as periodic as an .  Twice a week he came—all through that winter, all through the spring following, through the summer, through the autumn, the next winter, the next year, and the next, till an span of human life had passed by.  Bellston still tarried.
 
Years and years Nic walked that way, at this of three days, from his house in the neighbouring town; and in every instance the aforesaid order of things was customary; and still on his arrival the form of words went on—‘He has not come?’
 
‘He has not.’
 
So they grew older.  The dim shape of that third one stood continually between them; they could not displace it; neither, on the other hand, could it effectually part them.  They were in close communion, yet not indissolubly united; lovers, yet never growing cured of love.  By the time that the fifth year of Nic’s visiting had arrived, on about the five-hundredth occasion of his presence at her tea-table, he noticed that the process which had begun upon his own locks was also spreading to hers.  He told her so, and they laughed.  Yet she was in good health: a condition of , which would have half-killed a man, had been endured by her without complaint, and even with composure.
 
One day, when these years of had numbered seven, they had strolled as usual as far as the waterfall, whose faint roar formed a sort of calling voice sufficient in the circumstances to direct their listlessness.  Pausing there, he looked up at her face and said, ‘Why should we not try again, Christine?  We are legally at liberty to do so now.  Nothing venture nothing have.’
 
But she would not.  Perhaps a little of idea was by this time the native daring of Christine.  ‘What he has done once he can do twice,’ she said.  ‘He is not dead, and if we were to marry he would say we had “forced his hand,” as he said before, and duly reappear.’
 
Some years after, when Christine was about fifty, and Nicholas fifty-three, a new trouble of a kind arrived.  He found an inconvenience in traversing the distance between their two houses, particularly in damp weather, the years he had spent in trying climates abroad having sown the seeds ............