All through the performance, which I was told went remarkably well, I was conscious of nothing but the seismic shudders and upheavals of my world too long subjected to strain. It came back on me in intervals through the evening performance; I was physically sick with it. But by degrees through its subsidence, new worlds began to rise. By the time I left the theatre that night I knew what I would do. It had been a mistake, a natural but cruel mistake, for Helmeth and me to suppose that a way of living could at any time be worth the very sap and source of life. Love was the central fact around which all modes and occupations should arrange themselves. Let us but love then, and live as we may. In all the world there was no need like the need I had for his breast, his arm. Always the point of our conclusions had been that I agreed with him, that I _had_ thought that failing to repeat the pattern of their mother in his children, I had failed in all, that I didn't any more than he see my way to keeping on with my work and meeting him at the door every night when he came home, in the sort of garment that, in the ladies' journals, went by the name of house gown. I laughed to think that we had not seen before that it was ridiculous. I had no more doubt now, no more trepidation. What burned in me was so clear a flame that he could not but be illuminated. Only let me find him, let me go to him again. At the hotel desk where I paused for my key I asked them to send up telegraph blanks to my room. With them came letters forwarded from New York. I started, as one does at an unexpected presence, to find an envelope among them with his familiar superscription. For the first time I would rather not have had a letter from him; it would be interposing a fresher picture between me and my new resolution, to put him for the moment farther from me. I saw then that the letter in my hand had been posted at Los Angeles; it was as though he had leaped suddenly all that distance nearer than his Chilicojote, Mexico. I noticed that it was a very thin letter. A thousand conjectures rushed upon me, not one of them with any relativity to what I would find, for when I tore it open there floated out a printed slip. It was a clipping from a Pasadena newspaper and announced his engagement to Edith Stanley. CHAPTER IX There is very little more to write. I held myself together until I had written to Helmeth to say that I understood why he had done what he had done, and that I hoped he would be happy. The letter was not written to invite an answer; there was nothing he could say to please me that would not have been disloyal to Miss Stanley. Accordingly no answer came, though it was a long time before I gave over the unconscious start at the sight of letters, the hope that somehow against all reason ... sometimes even yet....