Not to have done something with it, used it, worked it, talked about it at least, and perhaps even written--these things, at the rate she moved, represented a loss of opportunity under which as he saw her, she was peculiarly formed to wince.

She was at any rate, it was clear, doing something with it now; using it, working it, certainly, already talking--and, yes, quite possibly writing--about it.

She was in short smartly making up what she had missed, and he could take such comfort from his own action as he had been helped to by the rest of the facts, succinctly reported from Paris on the very morning of his start.
It was the singular story of a sharp split--in a good English house--that dated now from years back.

A worthy Briton, of the best middling stock, had, during the fourth decade of the century, as a very young man, in Dresden, whither he had been despatched to qualify in German for a stool in an uncle's counting-house, met, admired, wooed and won an American girl, of due attractions, domiciled at that period with her parents and a sister, who was also attractive, in the Saxon capital.
He had married her, taken her to England, and there, after some years of harmony and happiness, lost her.

The sister in question had, after her death, come to him and to his young child on a visit, the effect of which, between the pair, eventually defined itself as a sentiment that was not to be resisted.