If she felt toward him as he toward Madeline, it were worth his life to save the pity of another such heart-breaking.

So should he atone, perhaps, for the suffering Madeline had given him.
After tea he went by himself to nurse these wretched thoughts, and although the sight of Ida had suggested them, he went on to think of himself, and soon became so absorbed in his own misery that he quite forgot about her, and, failing to rejoin the girls that evening, Ida had to go home alone, which was a great disappointment to her.

But it was, perhaps, quite as well, on the whole, for both of them that he was not thrown with her again that evening.
It is never fair to take for granted that the greatness of a sorrow or a loss is a just measure of the fault of the one who causes it.

Madeline was not willingly cruel.

She felt sorry in a way for Henry whenever his set lips and haggard face came under her view, but sorry in a dim and distant way, as one going on a far and joyous journey is sorry for the former associates he leaves behind, associates whose faces already, ere he goes, begin to grow faded and indistinct.