A Broken Appointment

You did not come,
And marching Time drew on, and wore me numb.
Yet less for loss of your dear presence there
Than that I thus found lacking in your make
....

We've all been there, waiting on someone who never showed. These days it wouldn't be the lack of presence so much as the lack of an explanatory text that would have our minds making presumptions, reading into and over-analysing past interactions, concluding they clearly have no feelings at all rather than considering the mundane options of no credit, dead battery, phone lost, stolen or simply left at home. Thomas Hardy was without such technology to consider but his plight, and his resulting judgement of a woman not present to defend herself, has not changed in two hundred years.