He believed that he had for ever cut himself off from
the companionship that seemed highest and holiest on earth to him;
he should never see that girl again; Berry must have told Miss Swan,
and long before this Miss Carver had shuddered at the thought of him
as the accomplice of a thief. But he proudly said to himself that he
must let it all go; for if he had not been a thief, he had been a
beggar and a menial, he had come out of a hovel at home, and his
mother went about like a scarecrow, and it mattered little what kind
of shame she remembered him in.
He thought of her perpetually now, and, in those dialogues which we
hold in reverie with the people we think much about, he talked with
her all day long. At first, when he began to do this, it seemed a
wrong to Statira; but now, since the other was lost to him beyond
other approach, he gave himself freely up to the mystical colloquies
he held with her, as the devotee abandons himself to imagined
converse with a saint. Besides, if he was in love with Statira, he
was not in love with Jessie; that he had made clear to himself; for
his feeling toward her was wholly different.
Most of the time, in these communings, he was with her in her own
home, down at Corbitant, where he fancied she had gone, after the
catastrophe at the St. Albans, and he sat there with her on a porch
at the front door, which she had once described to him, and looked
out under the silver poplars at the vessels in the bay.
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