"I know now that I could never have entered fully into your life; the clay of my being leans too awry for that. But am I to blame for the shaking of the Potter's hand? I sought with all the assiduity of a weak woman's love, but there was a door to which I never found the key, a veil behind which I could not peer. Yet to me was given the rapture of the outer temple--and it was the bread of life. "Be generous to me in this, the hour of my bitter atonement, and believe that my love was as pure and unselfish as it is possible for a woman to give. The proof of it is that I am giving you up now when I know that by a little finesse I could pull you down to hell with me. For I have spilled the Red Wine for you, my Wolf, and the reek of it would have been a bond and heel-rope between us. "It is because of my love for you that I am giving you up, giving you into the hands of another woman. I have been but a flame to you, burning out the dross from your nature so that she might pour into her heart's crucible only the pure gold. God grant she mold the chalice aright. "And now farewell while I have yet strength to say it. Forget me if you can. But if from the heights you ever look backward and downward, and in the sea of memory catch one faint reflection of me, let the thought be a kindly one. "For oh, Man, who was more than God to me, I loved you too well!" Very reverently he kissed the letter, then burned it in the flame of the smoky lamp. It was a long and weary ride to the nearest telegraph office at Gunnison, yet he never dismounted from his staggering horse until he heard the clicking of the sounders in the dingy little office. "My life is yours alone," he wrote firmly; "let me make amends. Will you mold the chalice?" Feverishly he strode up and down his apartment at the hotel until her answering wire was laid in his hand: "You are even more noble than I thought, and shall have your reward. Grace waits you at Cairo. Have written her all that she must ever know. Go at once and God bless you both!" He left that night for the East, and at the house of the Brevoorts learned that Mr. Brevoort and his wife had taken their departure two days before on an extended tour of the Orient. Yes, Mrs. Brevoort had left an enclosure for him. It contained only a little note from Grace Carter to Constance and in his misery he could not understand why the latter had urged him to go to Cairo: "I forgive you, even as I think God has forgiven you," Grace wrote, "for I, too, have been whirled in the maelstrom of his irresistible passion. I do not presume to sit in judgment of you, for you have given him his life--and at what an awful price! May God grant you forgetfulness, the boon that has been denied me." Underneath this was written in Mrs. Carter's angular hand: