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This Joyce, who had been from the beginning the shadow upon her married life, in despite of whose possible claims she had married, and whom she had regarded all through with a mixture of pity and indignation and fear, roused in her, dead, almost as strong feelings as if she had been a living claimant to the name and place which were hers. The very fact that the poor girl’s story was so pitiful, and that nothing could take away the interest and compassion roused by the image of a young forsaken creature dying so miserably with no one near who loved her, was to Mrs. Hayward at this moment an additional aggravation, adding a pang to all the rest. And yet there was in it an unspeakable relief; and the fact that this, and not any revival of the romance of his youth, had been her husband’s first thought, was exquisite to her, yet with a certain acrid sweetness, not unmingled with pain and the contradictoriness of a highly sensitive, impatient, and intolerant soul, sharply conscious of every complication. For notwithstanding her strong personal share in the matter, it was clear to Elizabeth that he ought to have thought of the other, the poor girl in her youth and misery, first; and that the sight of her letter, the words written in her anguish, coming to him as it were from her grave, across the silence of twenty years, ought to have transported the man to whom these words were addressed out of all recollection of the present,—out of everything save that tragedy of which, however innocently, he was the cause. She could not but feel it sweet that it was herself and not the dead Joyce of whom in reality he had thought: yet, in a manner, she resented it, and was wounded by it as a thing against nature which ought not to have been. ‘That is all that a man’s love is worth,’ she said to herself. ‘He cost her her life, and it is me he thinks of, who am well and strong, and in no trouble.’ And yet it went to her heart that he should have so thought.