The Long Way by Mary Imlay Taylor

All this while Charter had been away. He had left Washington almost immediately and was taking his leave out of the sphere of its influence; he even dreaded the possibility of a summons to report at the War Department. Not that he was afraid to meet the problem and grapple with it, but he was determined to conquer it, and Rachel's very presence, under the altered conditions, had been too distracting a pain. If he was ever to see his way through it, he must see it without her. She had removed herself from his life and he had lived so long near the thought of her that her absence seemed to take the magic part of life away, to leave him a bare skeleton of meaningless days.

At first it was indeed impossible to believe in their final separation; there seemed to exist some indestructible tie between them, spiritual and therefore immortal, born of their community of soul, their absolute sympathy, their old happy comradeship. He could not quite believe that Rachel did not belong to him, that, instead, she belonged to Belhaven, and it was the necessity of recognizing that which forced him to the overt act of flight. He must feel that he was mistaken, that no infrangible bond existed between their spirits, that he was free as Rachel had shown that she felt herself to be free. He could not have explained this feeling, his folly as he called it, to himself, but he tried to urge on the process of dissolution, to slip out of the shackles, and the fact that he knew intuitively that Rachel was unhappy had not made the process of forgetting easier. To stand outside of her life, put out of it by her own act, and to witness her misery was like pouring gall into his wound; even his magnificent courage blenched before it.