He showed me Helen's letters that night. I had expected a small bundle, but there were only three; and he asked me to read them, not while I was with him, but later on when I was alone. The chance came after I had bidden him good-night; I went downstairs into the lounge, switched on one of the shaded table-lamps, lit a cigarette, and read the letters very carefully. They were none of them long, and all had been written and posted within a month of his arrival in Vienna. It was an odd sensation to sit in a hotel-lounge at two o'clock in the morning and disentangle a mystery; there was something eerie, almost, in trying to build up from a few sheets of handwriting the complete picture of what had happened seven years before. But there it was, in clear focus at last, and one glance was enough to show how wrong my ideas had been. Those letters were a revelation. They seemed to me the sort of letters that Helen could never have written, but perhaps that is the usual experience of outsiders who read other people's love-letters. Yes, they _were_ love-letters, except that the description is a shade too temperate.... And--to put the matter quite frankly--they were _not_ the wayward, semi-harmless chits that a married woman might send to a young exile in whom she was sentimentally interested. They were, on the contrary, highly damaging and incriminating documents; and all the time I was reading them I was picturing a packed Divorce Court in which some cool, smooth-voiced advocate (like Severn) was doling them out, sentence by sentence, and pausing with uplifted eyebrows at the end of each. The earliest of the trio had evidently been written and posted within a few hours of that quarrel with me in the Fleet Street tea-shop. There was, of course, no mention of it in the letter, and at least half the sentences were indignant questions. For instance: "... Terry, what _does_ your scrappy little note really mean? Why have you gone after all? What need was there for you to go? I feel dazed by it, so far; I cannot understand how or why you could have done it, after what we had arranged. Surely it was wonderful enough for us to be together, meeting so often, and with all the summer before us that we had planned--how could you _dare_ to break it all to pieces by going away? Terry, I'm angry with you--I _did_ think you would keep your word to me. Tell me what made you go--tell me _why_. And for God's sake, if you find there's nothing for you in Vienna, have the courage to come back. I'm frightened to think of you with that man Karelsky--he seems to me to be everything you'll never guess he is till it's too late.... Oh, you _are_ a fool for running away like this--it was our wonderful chance, and you've bungled all of it. I don't know whether I can ever forgive you...." A pause of ten days, and then the next, evidently in answer to a letter from him: