And Bud thankfully left his past behind the wall of silence.

So he had come to believe that he was almost as emotion-proof as Cash appeared to be, and had let it go at that.
Now here he was, with his heart and his mind full of Marie--after more than a year and a half of forgetting her! Getting drunk and playing poker all night did not help him at all, for when he woke it was from a sweet, intimate dream of her, and it was to a tormenting desire for her, that gnawed at his mind as hunger gnaws at the stomach.

Bud could not understand it.

Nothing like that had ever happened to him before.

By all his simple rules of reckoning he ought to be "over it" by now.