"The story, coming brokenly, by fits and starts, achieved by its very barrenness a certain grim intensity. The white light of his extraordinary narrative revealed a background sombre and hard, against which stood the drama of his ineffectual warfare, a play without hope and without reward, saved from inanity only by the tremendous fervour of his love. She had fled from New York without warning, it seems, fleeing from life, from him, from the scene and memory, perhaps, of that one day. He had a slight clue, but it took him half a year to find her. When at last they met, she didn’t want him, didn’t need him, wouldn’t have him. This was in San Francisco, where she went on the stage again, and lived for over a year, successful, apparently happy, and growing more beautiful every day. ’People talked about her, you know’ he told me ’She became quite the rage. Such a little girl, with serious eyes....’ She must have been clever, too, for she kept a good grip on herself. Soon she married a man of twice her years with a considerable fortune, and passed into another world. Bert had forsaken his profession, and had gone into journalism; he could have done anything passably well. One thing, however, he could not bring himself to do again, and that was to enter society. He didn’t get on as a journalist—couldn’t put his heart into the business of life. He told me that for a time he went shabby and hungry. Once in a great while he would see her, perhaps in passing, and they would have a few words together; but the occasions became more and more infrequent. "’Then she left her husband, in the whirlwind of a sensational scandal. Bert missed only by the merest chance having to write about it for his paper. He sought her out at once; she had gone to an hotel there in the city, where she lived openly as the mistress of the other man. ’What are you doing, Bert, hanging around this town?’ she had asked him point blank ’I want to be near in case you need me, Helen’ he answered humbly. She gazed at him with those eyes that, according to his account, still retained their innocence—though it’s hard to believe they hadn’t by then acquired a trace or two of calculation. ’It’s gone a long way beyond that’ said she coldly ’I won’t need you again’ He tried to take her hand. ’I can’t let you go thus, Helen!’ he cried ’Let me go? You sent me’ she told him. "’What was the use?’ said he to me ’I thought of the old days—they seemed old already; and when I looked at her, I couldn’t realize that there had been any change. But it seemed pretty evident that she had left off caring. So I left her—but I couldn’t go away’