Explore "The Angel of Pain" by E.F. Benson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Evelyn woke that morning out of one of those cruel, dreamless sleeps that seem for a little while on waking to have expunged all memory, and he lay a few minutes conscious vaguely of something a little wrong, but for the moment not knowing where he was, and not caring to make the effort to guess. Then suddenly, like the stroke of a black wing across the sky, memory came home for the day. Whenever he woke in the hereafter he would awake to that, to his maimed, ruined life. The knowledge of it was more unbearable to-day than it had been yesterday; to-morrow it would be worse; it would keep growing worse.
Then out of that utter darkness there grew a little light. It might have been even more desperate -- how was that? Then he remembered Madge. She had seen, and the worst of all that he had imagined was not true.