I think I could have borne with it, could have tried meekly to steal back into his heart again, to win him back, in despite of ignorance, gawkiness, and all other my drawbacks, by force of sheer love.
But the change was surely too abrupt to be accounted for on this hypothesis.

Would _Roger_, my pattern of courtesy--Roger, who shrinks from hurting the meanest beggar's feelings--would he, in such plain terms, have deplored and wished undone our marriage, if it were only suffering to _himself_ that it had entailed?
Has his unselfish chivalry gone the way of Algy's brotherly love?
Impossible! the more I think of it, the more unlikely it seems--the more certain it appears to me that I must look elsewhere for the cause of the alteration that has so heavily darkened my day.
I have risen, and am walking quickly up and down.

I have shaken off my stolid apathy, or, rather, it has fallen off of itself.

Can she have told him any ill tales of me?
any thing to my disadvantage?
Instantly the thought of Musgrave--the black and heavy thought that is never far from the portals of my mind--darts across me, and, at the same instant, like a flash of lightning, the recollection of my meeting her on the fatal evening, just as (with tear-stained, swollen face) I had parted from Frank--of the alert and lively interest in her eyes, as she bowed and smiled to me, flames with sudden illumination into my soul.

Still I can hardly credit it.