So it was there we met on that last afternoon to say good-bye. We had put off till the last moment any consideration of what was to happen next. We had made no plans to meet again. I did not even know that Lord Ledbury had a house in London, to which Violet was taken at rare intervals, when it happened to be without a tenant, but always under strict guard and more for business than for pleasure. We had not even discussed any plans for correspondence, though it was evident that I could not write to her at her father’s house without everything coming out. It was understood between us that my very existence must be kept secret if it were possible. Beyond that we had not found courage to face the situation. And now we had to face it at last, and it was too much for us to bear. It seemed to both of us like death. It was idle to think that we could part like that, uncertain if ever we should meet again. It was a waste of breath to pronounce the word good-bye when we were clinging to each other in the desperation of young life in travail with its destiny. I dare not try to recall that agony.... I stole across with the footstep of a felon and closed the battered door. When I had slain my love I understood too late what I had done. Her anguish was a revelation to me of what her utter purity had been. We passed out from that brief frenzy into a strange world. The sun had fallen from our sky, and Joshua could not have called it back again. We were two spectres in each other’s sight. I did not ask her to forgive me--I could not forgive myself. Rather would I have begged her to reproach me. But no such thought was in her mind. Her whole feeling was one of horror at what she had destroyed in herself; and I was only hateful to her as the mirror in which she had seen her unknown self. She moved her lips to implore me never to let her see me again. She shuddered past me, and went down the hill with the stumbling gait of a wounded bird. I know there are some men, and there may be some women, who will think that I was a fool to let her go. They will tell me that I ought not to have taken her at her word; that if I had waited, in a short time she would have recovered, and the breach might have been patched up, and the wound healed. I cannot tell if they are right; I only know that I obeyed her, and fled from her neighbourhood with no hope of ever coming back. And so the lonely girl, left to herself with no one to confide in, brooded over her secret till it became like a viper gnawing at her heart. How she came to hear of the charlatan she had not told me. Somehow or other during one of her stays in her father’s house in town, the news reached her of the new science of psycho-analysis, and of the practitioner who undertook to do what Macbeth longed for in vain, to pluck from memory a rooted sorrow, and erase the writing from the tablets of the brain.