I had kept sufficient of a reckoning to know it was too early, and now it all came borne to me, how I had been with Tathra, how I had neglected her. I recollected she had said, “You have punished me enough by ceasing to love me.” I might have shrunk down into a child again. Suddenly I could see her in my mind’s eye, her beauty and its loss, her wretched life, that she had needed me and I had found another.
