ner of the road will
have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story. And
yet I do believe that for every man there comes at last a woman--or no,
that is the wrong way of formulating it. For every man there comes
at last a time of life when the woman who then sets her seal upon his
imagination has set her seal for good. He will travel over no more
horizons; he will never again set the knapsack over his shoulders; he
will retire from those scenes. He will have gone out of the business.
That at any rate was the case with Edward and the poor girl. It was
quite literally the case. It was quite literally the case that his
passions--for the mistress of the Grand Duke, for Mrs Basil, for little
Mrs Maidan, for Florence, for whom you will--these passions were merely
preliminary canters compared to his final race with death for her. I
am certain of that. I am not going to be so American as to say that all
true love demands some sacrifice. It doesn't. But I think that love will
be truer and more permanent in which self-sacrifice has been exacted.
And, in the case of the other women, Edward just cut in and cut them
out as he did with the polo-ball from under the nose of Count Baron von
Leloeffel. I don't mean to say that he didn't wear himself as thin as a
lath in the endeavour to capture the other women; but over her he wore
himself to rags and tatters and death--in the effort to leave her alone.

And, in speaking to her on that night, he wasn't, I am convinced,
committing a baseness. It was as if his passion for her hadn't existed;
as if the very words that he spoke, without knowing that he spoke them,
created the passion as they went along. Before he spoke, there was
nothing; afterwards, it was the integral fact of his life. Well, I must
get back to my story.

And my story was concerning itself with Florence--with Florence,
who heard those words from behind the tree. That of course is only
conjecture, but I think the conjecture is pretty well justified. You
have the fact that those two went out, that she followed them almost
immediately afterwards through the darkness and, a little later, she
came running back to the hotel with that pallid face and the hand
clutching her dress over her heart. It can't have been only Bagshawe.
Her face was contorted with agony before ever her eyes fell upon me
or upon him beside me. But I dare say Bagshawe may have been the
determining influence in her suicide. Leonora says tha