“Go away, or you will drive me daft!” said Lily. “He will just clear the board of every thing that’s on it and never think of me. Why should he, with such a fine appetite as he has? Do I want him to starve for me?” she cried, with a laugh. But the result was another fit of tears. In short, Lily was as silly as any girl could be on the day her lover left her. She was not even as she had been for a moment, and was bound to be again, a young wife astonished and disappointed at being left behind, not knowing how to account for this strange, new authority over her which had it in its power to change the whole current of her life. She had never looked at Ronald in that light or thought of him as a power over her, a judge, a law-giver, whose decisions were to be supreme. She was astonished to find herself subdued before him now, her own convictions put aside; but this was not the channel in which for the moment her thoughts were running. She was weeping for her lover, for the happiness that was over, for him who was away, and dreaming dreams to herself of how the coach might be stopped by the snow, or some accident happen that would still bring him back. She imagined to herself his step on the stair and the shriek of joy with which she would rush to welcome him. This was the subject of her thoughts, broken into occasionally by divergences to other points, by outbursts of astonishment, of disappointment, almost of resentment, but always returning as to the background and foundation of every thing. The other thoughts lay in waiting for her, biding their time. It was the dreadful loss, the blank, the void, the silence, that afflicted her now. Ronald gone, who for this week, which had been as years, as a whole life, her life, the real and true one, to which all the rest was only a preface and preliminary, had been her companion, almost herself! It was of this that her heart was full. Without him, what was Lily now? She had been often a weary, angry, dull, disappointed little girl before, but there were always breaks in which she felt herself, as she said, her own woman and was herself all the Lily there was. But now she had merged into another being; she was Lily no longer, but only a broken-off half of something different, something more important, all throbbing with enlarged and bigger life. This consciousness was enough for the girl to master during that endless, dreary, monotonous day. CHAPTER XXIII