o
see you read it. . . . Never mind."

That was the first hint of an intention of which I was soon to hear
more; but meanwhile, after eight more days, the third part came, with
the scene from which he expected so much, and with a mention of what the
writing of it had cost him. "This book (whether in the Hajji Baba sense
or not I can't say, but certainly in the literal one) has made my face
white in a foreign land. My cheeks, which were beginning to fill out,
have sunk again; my eyes have grown immensely large; my hair is very
lank; and the head inside the hair is hot and giddy. Read the scene at
the end of the third part, twice. I wouldn't write it twice, for
something. . . . You will see that I have substituted the name of Lilian
for Jessie. It is prettier in sound, and suits my music better. I
mention this, lest you should wonder who and what I mean by that name.
To-morrow I shall begin afresh (starting the next part with a broad
grin, and ending it with the very soul of jollity and happiness); and I
hope to finish by next Monday at latest. Perhaps on Saturday. I hope you
will like the little book. Since I conceived, at the beginning of the
second part, what must happen in the third, I have undergone as much
sorrow and agitation as if the thing were real; and have wakened up with
it at night. I was obliged to lock myself in when I finished it
yesterday, for my face was swollen for the time to twice its proper
size, and was hugely ridiculous.". . . His letter ended abruptly. "I am
going for a long walk, to clear my head. I feel that I am very shakey
from work, and throw down my pen for the day. There! (That's where it
fell.)" A huge blot represented it, and, as Hamlet says, the rest was
silence.

Two days later, answering a letter from me that had reached in the
interval, he gave sprightlier account of himself, and described a happy
change in the weather. Up to this time, he protested, they had not had
more than four or five clear days. All the time he had been writing they
had been wild and stormy. "Wind, hail, rain, thunder and lightning.
To-day," just before he sent me his last manuscript, "has been November
slack-baked, the sirocco having come back; and to-night it blows great
guns with a raging storm." "Weather worse," he wrote after three
Mondays, "than any November English weather I have ever beheld, or any
weather I have had experience of anywhere. So horrible to-day that all
power has been rained and gloomed