“...I am lonely beyond bearing, and afraid. I am so afraid. I wonder, will you understand? But if I bore you take courage, for I will not bore you again. You are my friend, and this is my good-bye. Forgive me, dear, the arrogance of calling you my friend. But I am so afraid. _Et, satyr bien-aimé, j’ai raison...._” I could, you can understand, make neither head nor tail of it. She might hate--me! She might, heaven knew, be indifferent to me, but why, how, hate? And _satyr bien-aimé_ was all very well, but it meant nothing. On the later pages she seemed to have controlled her hand a little, but her mind, if one might judge, remained ... well, was that, perhaps, the effect on a mind of a draughty house on a hill of strangled olives? “I am lonely, but I have always been lonely since I was eighteen. Yes, I can trace my loneliness since then. It is a long time.” This letter, you must remember, came only a month after Gerald’s death. She wrote of that night, and here her haunted pencil was at its most firm, if that is saying anything. “There I stood in the old, old darkness--how old darkness is, have you ever felt?--while you were upstairs in Gerald’s room. And I listened, but I could not hear you moving, so I imagined you to be staring at Gerald from the door, as you and I did that night a million years ago, when, do you remember, you suddenly, strangely from your heart, made that defiant courtesy to my hand? And, do you know, I almost cried because of your kindness to that poor, helpless sweet. Oh, Hilary has told me about you, and you luring Gerald off to a Home, but all in vain, my poor Gerald. And then I heard you switch out the light, and down you came, slowly, slowly, more silent than the darkness, and when you spoke your voice was as old as the darkness. But you are very young really, else you couldn’t be so defiantly, so imperiously, kind. And I remember wondering why you said you had no matches left, for before you went upstairs I had seen a box half-full in your hand, but I said to myself: ‘He has forgotten, and he is wretched at his friend’s weakness.’ Ah, you should have told me about Gerald there and then, indeed you should! But you did not, for my unworthy comfort’s sake. Dear, you have a fine touch for the affections--but cruel, that is what you were, cruel. You laid your foot down on the soil of kindness, but where your foot fell there leapt up a dandelion ... and in the heart of the dandelion a tiny little rose; but what, my friend, is one little rose surrounded to suffocation by a huge dandelion?” Well! Puzzle this way, puzzle that way, I couldn’t make a glimmer of sense out of that passage. I was pleased, of course, that she seemed to like me, but as to the rest....