These marriages deal such a blow at faith in the deathlessness of love, and whether the woman herself is married or not, there remains always a secret and very tender corner in her heart for the man who, having loved her unavailingly, has still found no other to take her place even twenty or thirty years later.
Nan was conscious of an unspeakably deserted feeling.

Maryon had gone completely out of her life; Peter, the man she loved, could never come into it; and the only man who strove for entrance was, as Penelope had said, the last man in the world to make her happy.
Nevertheless, it seemed as though with gentle taps and pushes Fate were urging them together--forcing her towards Roger so that she might escape from forbidden love and the desperate fear and pain of it.
And then she saw him coming--it seemed almost as though her thought had drawn him--coming with swift feet over the grassy slopes of the park, too eager to follow the winding carriage-way, while the fallow-deer bounded lightly aside at the sound of his footsteps, halting at a safe distance to regard the intruder with big, timorous, velvety eyes.
Nan paused in the middle of the rose-garden, where a stone sundial stood--grey and weather-beaten, its warning motto half obliterated by the tender touches of the years: "Time flies.

Remember that each breath But wafts thy erring spirit nearer death." Rather nervously, while she waited for Trenby to join her, she traced the ancient lettering with a slim forefinger.

He crossed the lawn rapidly, pausing beside her, and without looking up she read aloud the grim couplet graven round the dial.
"That's a nice cheery motto," commented Trenby lightly.

"They must have been a lugubrious lot in the good old days!" "They weren't so afraid of facing the truth as we are," Nan made answer musingly.