His passion had run its inevitable course of desire,
fulfilment, and exhaustion. So closely had it followed the changing
seasons, that it seemed, in a larger and more impersonal aspect, as much
a product of the soil as did the flame-coloured lilies that bloomed
in the Haunt's Walk. The summer had returned, and a hardier growth had
sprung up from the ground enriched by the decay of the autumn. He was
conscious of a distinct relief because the torment of his earlier love
for Blossom was over. There was no regret in his mind for the poignant
sweetness of the days before he had married her--for the restlessness,
the expectancy, the hushed waitings, the enervating suspense--nor even
for those brief hours of fulfilment, when that same haunting suspense
had seemed to add the sharpest edge to his enjoyment. He did not suffer
to-day if she were a few minutes late at the meeting; and he disliked
suffering so much that the sense of approaching bliss had never
compensated for the pang of it. Her failures now merely made his
manufactured excuses the easier. Once, when she had not been able to
come, he had experienced a revulsion of feeling; like the sudden lifting
of a long strain of anxiety.
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