Peace did not come to him for long; the wounds of the warring interlude of life had been too deep. He forgot himself at last in the treadmill quiet of days all serene laboriousness, knowing that it could not be for many years that he should watch the drama. She had shattered herself on him; but he, too, had felt that in himself something had broken. And he forgot the wounds, except when some sight or sound, the song of a bird in Spring, a spray of heather, a sky of stars, startled them to deep throbbing. And then a hand, stretched out from the past, would seize him, a shudder, a pang, would shake him, and he would know that he was alone and that he remembered. End of Project Gutenberg's The Shadow of Life, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick