of how I had made you suffer, and that, though my whole life yearned toward you with tenderness, love, contrition, unutterable, I never in all my life could do the slightest, smallest thing toward making amends to you, toward soothing the pain, healing the wounds, that I had inflicted upon you--upon you, my pale, sweet lady--oh, I ask you to imagine how heavily that knowledge weighed upon my spirit, how sharp its clutch was, how it would never let me rest, never allow me a moment of forgetfulness, but clung constantly and grimly, a monster with which it would be futile for me to hope to struggle. That last meeting between us, when you came here to my studio, to this very room, to the room I am writing in now, and I here, in my uncle's presence, threw you down and trampled upon you, and allowed him to lead you away, crushed and bleeding--that last meeting, when I still had it in my power to spare you all that shame and sorrow, to take you in my arms, and quiet all your pain, and kiss away all your fear, and to _keep_ you--keep you for myself--oh, you may imagine how my memory of that meeting, my realization of how I had hurt and humiliated you, my recognition of the wasted possibilities it had held, would not out of my heart, but abode there all the time, eating into it like acid. The walls and ceiling of the room, which had been witnesses of that last meeting, seemed eternally to be crying it out at me. When I looked at the floor, it was as if I saw a blood-stain there where you had stood. Oh, to think that there for one long minute you did really stand, you yourself, within arm's-reach of me; and I might have put out my hand, and touched you, and taken hold of you, and kept you to me forever, but did not! To think that I let you go; and you went; and I did not call you back! Oh, God, if I had only come to my senses soon enough to have called you back! But no, no; you went; and there was an end of it all. Love, happiness, hope, all went out with you. I drove you out. I drove them out. Christine, for every single pain that I inflicted upon you at that meeting, I ask you to believe, I have never ceased to pay with the acutest anguish that I am capable of feeling. That spot on my floor where you stood--ah, God, how many thousand times have I kissed it since! Ah, God, if there were only some power in earth or heaven that could bring you back there, make you stand there, again, for just one minute more! And it was I--I, whose soul goes out to you with an immensity of love that I can not find words for---- I, who would give all the rest of my life for the privilege of caressing and comforting you for a single instant--I, whose place it was to shield you and protect you--I myself, who drove you awray from here, heart-broken, never to return. Oh, my beautiful, pale darling! Christine, lost, lost forever! Here am I, my heart bursting with the desire to be, in some way, of some sort of service to you; and there