She still planned and schemed to shield him, not so much from the world, as from himself.

Yet he had seen, almost from the first, that their pursuit of contentment was born of their common and ever-increasing terror of the future.

Each left unuttered the actual emptiness and desolation of life, yet each nursed the bitter sting of it.

Day by day he had put on a bold face, because he had long since learned how poignantly miserable his own misery could make her.

And, above all things, he hated to see her unhappy..