The servant began loudly calling for her mistress; her alarm forced me to control myself. One idea was aflame within me; to find them, to find them wherever they might be. To accept this blow, to resign myself to such a calamity was impossible. I learnt from the landlady that they had got on to a steamer at six o’clock in the morning, and were going down the Rhine. I went to the ticket-office; there I was told they had taken tickets for Cologne. I was going home to pack up at once and follow them. I happened to pass the house of Frau Luise.… Suddenly I heard some one calling me. I raised my head, and at the window of the very room where I had met Acia the day before, I saw the burgomaster’s widow. She smiled her loathsome smile, and called me. I turned away, and was going on; but she called after me that she had something for me. These words brought me to a halt, and I went into her house. How can I describe my feelings when I saw that room again?… ‘By rights,’ began the old woman, showing me a little note; ‘I oughtn’t to have given you this unless you’d come to me of your own accord, but you are such a fine young man. Take it.’ I took the note. On a tiny scrap of paper stood the following words, hurriedly scribbled in pencil: ‘Good-bye, we shall not see each other again. It is not through pride that I’m going away--no, I can’t help it. Yesterday when I was crying before you, if you had said one word to me, only one word--I should have stayed. You did not say it. It seems it is better so.… Good-bye for ever!’ One word.… Oh, madman that I was! That word … I had repeated it the night before with tears, I had flung it to the wind, I had said it over and over again among the empty fields … but I did not say it to her, I did not tell her I loved her.… Indeed, I could not have uttered that word then. When I met her in that fatal room, I had as yet no clear consciousness of my love; it had not fully awakened even when I was sitting with her brother in senseless and burdensome silence … it flamed up with irrepressible force only a few instants later, when, terrified by the possibility of misfortune, I began to seek and call her … but then it was already too late. ‘But that’s impossible!’ I shall be told; I don’t know whether it’s possible, I know that it’s the truth. Acia would not have gone away if there had been the faintest shade of coquetry in her, and if her position had not been a false one. She could not put up with what any other girl would have endured; I did not realise that. My evil genius had arrested an avowal on my lips at my last interview with Gagin at the darkened window, and the last thread I might have caught at, had slipped out of my fingers.