“I know the pain this letter will give you; I know, I know. You will be unhappy, you will be angry with me. Dearest, try to forgive me. I am doing the only thing there is for me to do. You will be glad of it in the future. You will shudder to think, ’What if that woman had taken me at my word!’—Oh, why weren’t you born ten years earlier, or I ten years later? “I am going to the Convent of Saint Veronica, to pass Lent. Perhaps I shall stay longer. Perhaps—do not cry out, it is not a sudden resolution—perhaps I shall remain there, as an oblate. I could teach music, French. I must do something. I must not lead this idle futile life. Do not think of me as undergoing hardships. The rule for an oblate is not severe. “Good-bye, dear. I pray God to bless you in every way. “Good-bye, good-bye. “Gabrielle.” Don’t ask me what I felt, what I did.... Lent dragged itself away, but she did not return to Rome. Then one day I received by post a copy of the Osservatore Romano, with a marked paragraph. It announced that the Contessa Bracca had been received into the Pious Community of Saint Veronica as a noble oblate. Her letter, and that paragraph, cut from the Osservatore Romano, lie before me now, on my writing-table. Don’t ask me what I feel, as I look at them. MERELY PLAYERS I My dear,” said the elder man, “as I’ve told you a thousand times, what you need is a love-affair with a red-haired woman.” “Bother women,” said the younger man, “and hang love-affairs. Women are a pack of samenesses, and love-affairs are damnable iterations.” They were seated at a round table, gay with glass and silver, fruit and wine, in a pretty, rather high-ceiled little grey-and-gold breakfast-room. The French window stood wide open to the soft June day. From the window you could step out upon a small balcony; the balcony overhung a terrace; and a broad flight of steps from the terrace led down into a garden. You could not perceive the boundaries of the garden; in all directions it offered an indefinite perspective, a landscape of green lawns and shadowy alleys, bright parterres of flowers, fountains, and tall bending trees. I have spoken of the elder man and the younger, though really there could have been but a trifling disparity in their ages: the elder was perhaps thirty, the younger seven- or eight-and-twenty. In other respects, however, they were as unlike as unlike may be. Thirty was plump and rosy and full-blown, with a laughing good-humoured face, and merry big blue eyes; eight-and-twenty, thin, tall, and listless-looking, his face pale and aquiline, his eyes dark, morose. They had finished their coffee, and now the plump man was nibbling sweetmeats, which he selected with much careful discrimination from an assortment in a porcelain dish. The thin man was drinking something green, possibly chartreuse. “Women are a pack of samenesses,” he grumbled, “and love-affairs are damnable iterations.”