In their room there she was sleeping still, deliciously tired. In an hour, in two hours, perhaps sooner, when she rose to come and join him, she would find his cruel letter on the dressing-table, telling her in tender words that the moment for their separation had come. She would not understand it quite at once. The papers enclosed in the envelope would tell her more. They were the hotel bill, paid and receipted, some banknotes, and a receipt for the money deposited in her name with the International Bank of Milan, the sum completed by Margaret Roquevillard’s cheque which Maurice had endorsed to her. By these she would see what it was that had come between them and broken her sway. The family which she had vanquished was recapturing her lover. She would give a great cry of sorrow then. However far away he might be from her, he should hear her cry resounding in his ears.... In the woods the moonlight was losing itself in the light of morning. The hour was passing. He leant against one of the columns, and could not make up his mind to go. “Where did I get the courage,” he asked himself, “to break her heart and mine? She is there, quite near me yet. If I go back again she’ll never know. Her waking will be sweet and easy. But no, I shall never see her again. There are ties that love cannot obliterate. Happiness, I can understand it now, is not one’s right. I wound her, yet I love her. The wrong she did me was involuntary. I don’t remember anything but having felt life near her, of having lived it near her each minute to the full; and yet I can’t stay near her now any more. Do you remember our first days, Edith? You gave me some flowers the first evening. And then you gave me your lips, as sweet as flowers, and were glad to give them. When you said to me, ‘I will be yours, but yours alone, when you want me,’ I could feel even then your caresses that made you one flesh with mine. Because you are too sensitive to love’s touch, because even now when I am going to make you suffer, I tremble for your frailty, tremble for the future, oh, Edith, don’t think I love you less. When I realise that for that very thing in you I may lose you one day, Edith, I ought not to think this of you, yet perhaps I love you all the more. What memories shall you keep of me? Between two autumns our love has run its course. You preferred this autumn season, when nature’s mood is high. I found its gold again in your eyes, and its fever in your arms. I discovered enthusiasm in it, and desire. Now it is like the chrysanthemums in the cemetery at Orta for me. It covers Death. Yes, death, you understand. I have not said good-bye to you, yet all is over for us. It is like death for us. You will weep as you have been used to do. You’ll talk, you’ll walk, you’ll be for others a living creature, a being of grace and youth: but for me, who shall know nothing more of you, you will be as if you had died. It might be better if you were dead indeed: you would