He could swear he did not look back, could not--by any optical chance, or in any prism--have seen her physically as he walked away; and yet, with dreadful distinction, he retained forever a composite picture of her standing where he left her. The picture--which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never--consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past.