ever been. You have cut out its very roots. I
had a great friendship for you--more, a great affection. It would have
stood a great deal. I would have passed over many injuries that you
might have done. Anything almost but this, that you knew was so
completely blasting to all my own desires. This shows me what your
feelings must have been at the time, at any rate, and remember a thick
manuscript is not burnt in a minute. How long must it have taken you to
destroy those sheets upon sheets of paper in which you knew another
man's very heart, and blood, and nerve had been infused? All that time
you must have been animated with the sheer lust of cruelly and brutally
ill-using and injuring me, and in return I"--

I shut and locked my lips upon the words that rose.

To abuse or curse another is almost as degrading to oneself as to
strike him.

We had come up to the end of the alley now, and we paused by the blank
brick wall. There was a lamp projecting from it which threw some light
upon us both, and, as his figure came distinctly before my eyes, I felt
one intolerable desire to leap upon him--this miserable creature who
had destroyed my work--fling him to the ground, and grind his face and
head to a shapeless mass in this slimy gutter that flowed at our feet.

Could he have faintly realised what my feelings were, coward as he was,
he would never have come up this empty alley with me.

"Well, Victor, I am leaving Paris to-night; but I felt I could not go
without telling you how infinitely I regret it all. If you can never be
my friend again, you can forgive me. Let me hear you say that you do
before I go."

Forgive him! Great God! Forgive an injury so wanton, so excuseless!
Every savage instinct in me leapt up at the word.

The manuscript! I felt inclined to shout to him. The manuscript! Give
that back to me and then come and talk about forgiveness. Had the act
and the motive been as loathsome, but the injury, the actual injury,
the positive loss to me been less, I could have forgiven; but the blow
was so sharp, the damage so irremediable, I could not. Even at his
words I seemed to see staring me in the face the months of toil
awaiting me before I could rebuild--if I could ever--the fabric he had
destroyed in half-an-hour.

And crowding upon this came the thought of what he had robbed me of,
the name, the freedom, the power that those vanished paper pages had
been pregnant with for me. He was leaving Paris, he said; a