"When I was at the door I had to turn round. I had feared this moment of going, and I had made up my mind to go quickly and be done with it. But I make a bad actor, and artistic effects can go to the devil for all I care. With my hand on the knob I had to turn round. "'I can't go like this,' I said. And I walked back across the room, and looked down on her. "'I can't. It seems wrong,' I said. "'Perhaps, then, it was not worth it?' she asked, so tentatively! "'It will always have been worth it.... But there _is_ something missing, isn't there?' "'But, of course, Don Noël! There is much missing, for it is an unfinished romance which will never be finished. You do not understand--this is life! "'I know. You are a baby, like all really nice men, and you want a piece of chocolate to eat as you go away,' she said. 'Bring your head down--yes, down, down, Noël--and I will give it to you.... Listen, you! It is decided that you will never see me again, is it not? And that you will keep your promise not to look where this house is, so that you will never, never find me again? But, my dear, will you please believe that I am ver' ver' sorry, that I would like to see you many, many times before this stupid "good-bye." For it is not every day that people like you and I meet, we could laugh and cry so well together.... A long time ago, as we came into this house (and we came in because we had to come in, my Noël) I asked you if you were good at forgetting. But you have been such a dear that I now give you permission to remember--me! And that is the end of my vanity and your love affair, Don Noël, for now you must go away, out of the house into the night from which you came--oh, so wonderfully! Go--adieu, adieu.' "And this time I did not turn round at the door, but went out of the room and out of the house, into the pale darkness of the early morning. The squat shape of the electric brougham was there, waiting on ice for me; but the bent figure of the man in the driving-seat seemed asleep, he certainly did not hear me until I was opening the door of the cab, when I gave him my direction. And I stepped in. The thing glided softly away, and I lay back and closed my eyes.... "I don't know how what I've told you has impressed you, I may indeed have made the thing seem farcical; it had begun as a--well--casual adventure, it had ended--ended! with me sitting back in her brougham, seriously, abjectly miserable! My feeling was one of deadly and unutterable flatness--just that. From my own lips had come a promise that I would let something go, something which I wanted more than anything else in the world, something which would never come back! I would never see her again! Everything but that one agonising certainty was in utter blankness. I was very flat, everything was grey....