He drew it from the zinc-well in which it was packed in moss and cotton-wool, and wondered what he should do with it.  He could not leave such a thing about, nor would he take it away.  Suddenly an idea struck him, and he repacked it in its case as carefully as he could in the original moss and cotton-wool, and then looked about for the sheet of tissue-paper that should complete the covering.  He had destroyed it, and had to search for a substitute.  In so doing his eye fell upon a long envelope on his dressing-table and he smiled.  It contained his marriage licence, and he bethought him that it was a very fair substitute for tissue-paper, and quite as worthless.  He extracted it, and, placing it over the flowers, closed up the box.  Then he carefully directed it to “Mrs. George Caresfoot, Abbey House,” and, ringing the bell, desired the boots to find a messenger to take it over.

When he had done all this, he sat down and wondered what could have come to him that he could take pleasure in doing a cruel action only worthy of a jealous woman.

Perhaps of all the bitter cups which are held to our lips in this sad world there is none more bitter than that which it was his lot to drink of now.  To begin with, the blow fell in youth, when we love or hate, or act, with an ardour and an entire devotion that we give to nothing in after-life.  It is then that the heart puts forth its most tender and yet its most lusty shoots, and if they are crushed the whole plant suffers, and sometimes bleeds to death.  Arthur had, to an extent quite unrealized by himself until he lost her, centred all his life in this woman, and it was no exaggeration to say, as he had said to her, that she had murdered his heart, and withered up all that was best in it.  She had done more, she had inflicted the most cruel injury upon him that a woman can inflict upon a man.  She had shaken his belief in her sex at large.

He felt, sitting there in his desolation, that now he had lost Angela he could never be the same man he would otherwise have been.  Her cruel desertion had shattered the tinted glass through which youth looks at the world, and he now, before his day, saw it as it is, grim and hard, and full of coarse realities, and did not yet know that time would again soften down the sharpest of the rough outlines, and throw a garment of its own over the nakedness of life.  He was a generous-hearted man and not a vain one, and had he thought that Angela had ceased to care for him and loved this other man, he could have found it in his heart to forgive her, and even to sympathize with her; but he could not think this.  Something told him that it was not so.  She had contracted herself into a shameful, loveless marriage, and, to gain ends quite foreign to all love, had raised a barrier between them which had no right to exist, and yet one that in this world could, he thought, never be removed.