There is no such thing as a stationary love: men are either loving more or loving less.

But Giles himself recognized no decline in his sense of her dearness.

If the flame did indeed burn lower now than when he had fetched her from Sherton at her last return from school, the marvel was small.

He had been laboring ever since his rejection and her marriage to reduce his former passion to a docile friendship, out of pure regard to its expediency; and their separation may have helped him to a partial success.
A week and more passed, and there was no further news of Melbury.

But the effect of the intelligence he had already transmitted upon the elastic-nerved daughter of the woods had been much what the old surgeon Jones had surmised.