The Wheel of Life by Ellen Glasgow

For a minute after Kemper had passed in his car, Adams turned back and stood looking down the long street filled with pleasant June sunshine. In the distance a hand-organ was grinding out a jerky sentimental air, and beside him, at the corner by which he stood, a crippled vender of fruit had halted his little cart of oranges and apples.

A year ago Adams might have told himself, in the despair of ignorance, that since Laura had given her love to Kemper she was lost to him forever. But he had learned now that this could not be true -- that she was too closely knit into his destiny to separate herself entirely from it; and there came to him, while he stood there, a strange mystic assurance that she would some day feel that she had need of him again. His love had passed triumphantly through its first earthly stages, and in the large impassioned yearning with which he thought of her there was, so far as he himself was conscious, but little left of a sharper personal desire. All desire, indeed, which has its root in the physical craving for possession seemed to have gone out of him in the last few months; and since the earliest dawn of that deeper consciousness within his soul, he had almost ceased to think of himself as an isolated individual life.