The Miller of Old Church by Ellen Glasgow — Read

In front of Molly, the path, deep in silvery orchard grass, wound through the pasture to the witch-hazel thicket at Jordan's Journey; and when she entered the shelter of the trees, Gay came, whistling, toward her from the direction of the Poplar Spring. He walked rapidly, and his face wore an anxious and harassed expression, for he was making the unpleasant discovery that even stolen sweets may become cloying to a surfeited palate. His passion had run its inevitable course of desire, fulfilment, and exhaustion. So closely had it followed the changing seasons, that it seemed, in a larger and more impersonal aspect, as much a product of the soil as did the flame-coloured lilies that bloomed in the Haunt's Walk. The summer had returned, and a hardier growth had sprung up from the ground enriched by the decay of the autumn. He was conscious of a distinct relief because the torment of his earlier love for Blossom was over.

There was no regret in his mind for the poignant sweetness of the days before he had married her -- for the restlessness, the expectancy, the hushed waitings, the enervating suspense -- nor even for those brief hours of fulfilment, when that same haunting suspense had seemed to add the sharpest edge to his enjoyment. He did not suffer to-day if she were a few minutes late at the meeting; and he disliked suffering so much that the sense of approaching bliss had never compensated for the pang of it.