“But on that night I came to you a man utterly and hopelessly ruined—­morally dead of a blow dealt me an hour before I saw you for the first time.

“I had not lived an orderly life, but at worst it was only a heedless life.  I had been a fool, but not a damned one.  There was in me something loftier than a desire for pleasure, something worthier than material ambition.  What else lay latent—­if anything—­I may only surmise.  It is all dead.

“The blow dealt me that evening—­an hour before I first laid eyes on you—­utterly changed me; and if there was anything spiritual in my character it died then.  And left what you had a glimpse of—­just a man, pagan, material, unmoral, unsafe; unmoved by anything except by what appeals to the material senses.

“Is that the kind of man you suppose me?  That is the man I am.  And you know it now.  And you know, now, what it was in me that left you perplexed, silent, troubled, not comprehending—­why it was you would not dance with me again, nor suffer my touch, nor endure me too near you.

“It was the less noble in me—­all that the blow had not killed—­only a lesser part of a finer and perfect passion that might perhaps have moved you to noble response in time.

“Because I should have given you all at the first meeting; I could no more have helped it than I could have silenced my heart and lived.  But what was left to give could awake in you no echo, no response, no comprehension.  In plainer, uglier words, I meant to make you love me; and I was ready to carry you with me to that hell where souls are lost through love—­and where we might lose our souls together.

“And now you will never write to me again.”

All the afternoon she bent at her desk, poring over his letter.  In her frightened heart she knew that something within her, not spiritual, had responded to what, in him, had evoked it; that her indefinable dread was dread of herself, of her physical responsiveness to his nearness, of her conscious inclination for it.

Could this be she—­herself—­who still bent here over his written words—­this tense, hot-cheeked, tremulous creature, staring dry-eyed at the blurring lines which cut her for ever asunder from this self-outlawed man!

Was this letter still unburned.  Had she not her fill of its brutality, its wickedness?

But she was very tired, and she laid her arms on the desk and her head between them.  And against her hot face she felt the cool letter-paper.

All that she had dreamed and fancied and believed and cared for in man passed dully through her mind.  Her own aspirations toward ideal womanhood followed—­visions of lofty desire, high ideals, innocent passions, the happiness of renunciation, the glory of forgiveness——­

She sat erect, breathing unevenly; then her eyes fell on the letter, and she covered it with her hands, as hands cover the shame on a stricken face.  And after a long time her lips moved, repeating: