I was writing to Owen when my father brought me Katherine’s letter. It was to say good-bye to me, and there was a veiled reproach at my not having come to the station to see them off. She had looked out for me up to the last moment; so that in the end it was really I who had failed! I smiled dimly. As I write it now, in this quiet, gray, autumn morning, it appears to me that the thought then hovering at the back of my mind was, after all, not so very foolish. Death, coming without disease, without weakness, before life has grown stale, before illusions have been shattered and innocence marred;――simply upon the bright, fresh comedy of life, the dropping of a dark, rapid curtain. I finished my letter to Owen, and addressed it; but when that was done I still sat on at the table, holding my pen, on which the ink had long since dried. Then I bent down and leaned my forehead upon Katherine’s open letter. When I looked up the sun was shining in the garden, and shining in on me through the window; nothing had changed.... In the afternoon I went up to Derryaghy, where Mrs. Carroll received me. I spoke quite quietly to her, just as usual; but all I remember now is that there were some red dahlias in a bowl on the table, and that Mrs. Carroll proposed taking me to Paris for my Christmas holidays. It was when I had left her and had gone out to walk in the woods, that I suddenly felt the full reality of what had happened. It meant that everything was finished, that I should never see Katherine again. I was filled with desolation, with a kind of sick feeling that my love had been superfluous, wasted, and perhaps distasteful. Last year I had been sorry to say good-bye to her; I had dreaded the new life opening out before me; but I had had the prospect of meeting her again at a year’s end, and the belief that she cared for me and would remember me. Now there was nothing――nothing. My grief was mingled with a kind of bitter, impotent rage against I knew not what. I kicked a stick that lay in my path savagely out of the way, cursing it under my breath. I flung myself down among the bracken. Sometimes a kind of blank would come into my mind, and I would find myself staring stupidly at the trees, while for a few moments an altogether different thought would slip into my brain; then my grief would overwhelm me once more, and blot out the world. But was this grief I felt? I do not know. It was different from what I felt later. It was something violent and maddening, sweeping over me in paroxysms, leaving me intervals of cold insensibility. And late that night, when, thoroughly wearied out, I went to bed, and from sheer exhaustion would be dropping off to sleep, from time to time it would pierce through my numbing senses, and waken me sharply, as if some one had violently pulled me, so that I would start up, yet for a moment not realize what it was that had wakened me.