he could have forgiven Jewdwine a sentiment over which he had apparently no control; he could have forgiven him anything, even his silence and his subterfuge, if he had only delivered Lucia’s messages.  That was an unpardonable cruelty.  It was like holding back a cup of water from a man dying of thirst.  He had consumed his heart with longing for some word or sign from her; he had tortured himself with his belief in her utter repudiation of him; and Jewdwine, who had proof of the contrary, had abandoned him to his belief.  He could only think that, after taking him up so gently, Lucia had dropped him and left him where he fell.  He owned that Jewdwine was not bound to tell him that Lucia had returned to England, or to provide against any false impression he might form as to her whereabouts; and it was not there, of course, that the cruelty came in.  He could have borne the sense of physical separation if, instead of being forced to infer her indifference from her silence, he had known that her kind thoughts had returned to him continually; if he had known that whatever else had been taken from him, he had kept her friendship.  Her friendship—­it was little enough compared with what he wanted—­but it had already done so much for him that he knew what he could have made of it, if he had only been certain that it was his.  He could have lived those five years on the memory of her, as other men live on hope; sustained by the intangible but radiant presence, by inimitable, incommunicable ardours, by immaterial satisfactions and delights.  If they had not destroyed all bodily longing, they would at least have made impossible its separation from her and transference to another woman.  They would have saved him from this base concession to the folly of the flesh, this marriage which, as its hour approached, seemed to him more inevitable and more disastrous.  Madness lay in the thought that his deliverance had been near him on the very day when he fixed that hour; and that at no time had it been very far away.  No; not when two years ago he had stood hesitating on the edge of the inexpiable, immeasurable folly; the folly that had received, engulfed him now beyond deliverance and return.  If only he had known; if he could have been sure of her friendship; if he could have seen her for one moment in many months, one hour in many years, the thing would never have begun; or, being begun, could never have been carried through.

Meanwhile the friendship remained.  His being married could not make it less; and his being unmarried would certainly not have made it more.  As there could be neither more nor less of it, he ought to have been able to regard it as a simple, definite, solidly satisfactory thing.  But he had no sooner realized that so much at least was his than he perceived that he had only the very vaguest notion as to the nature and extent of it.  Of all human relations, friendship was the obscurest, the most uncertainly defined.  At this point he remembered one fatal thing about her; it had always been her nature to give pleasure and be kind.  The passion, he imagined, was indestructible; and with a temperament like that she might be ten times his friend without his knowing from one day to another how he really stood with her.  And hitherto one means of judging had been altogether denied to him; he had never had an opportunity of observing her ways with other men.