... then remorse for this moment of betrayal, which so cavalierly belittled a decade of her life, turned her walk toward Dick's sanctuary.
Approaching noiselessly she saw him behind his cottage, sitting in a steamer chair by the cliff wall,and for a moment she regarded him silently. He was thinking, he was living a world completely his own and in the small motions of his face, the brow raised or lowered, the eyes narrowed or widened, the lips set and reset, the play of his hands, she saw him progress from phase to phase of his own story spinning out inside him,his own, not hers. Once he clenched his fists and leaned forward, once it brought into his face an expression of torment and despair--when this passed its stamp lingered in his eyes. For almost the first time in her life she was sorry for him--it is hard for those who have once been mentally afflicted to be sorry for those who are well,and though Nicole often paid lip service to the fact that he had led her back to the world she had forfeited, she had thought of him really as an inexhaustible energy,incapable of fatigue--she forgot the troubles she caused him at the moment when she forgot the troubles of her own that had prompted her. That he no longer controlled her--did he know that? Had he willed it all?--she felt as sorry for him as she had sometimes felt for Abe North and his ignoble destiny, sorry as for the helplessness of infants and the old.