you can, as near 15 Pounds Sterling as possible, to save me from
irrevocable disgrace. I have no one but yourself to apply to. If you
refuse I am done for. You will know what a desperate position I am in,
I must be in, to ask you at all.--Yours in despair and everlasting
regret, HOWARD."

I read it through, and then dropped the letter and its envelope into
the fire, glad to get rid of the sight of the familiar hand. And I
watched it burn, and I thought of the manuscript which must have curled
and writhed in the same way, leaf by leaf, as he lighted it, and I
asked myself again--What is forgiveness?

I knew that I hated him. I had now the opportunity of consigning him to
"irrevocable disgrace," as he put it. But I knew that I should send him
the help he asked for on the same principle as I had refrained from
injuring him, forgiven him, shaken hands with him. And why? I wondered.
What was my motive? Simply, I think, a mere instinct to preserve my own
self-respect.

I enclosed a cheque for 20 Pounds Sterling in a blank sheet of paper,
put it in an envelope, and went out that same night and posted it. When
I had his letter of thanks I glanced through it hastily and then burnt
it, and tried to stamp out the re-awakened memory of him from my brain.
Weeks followed weeks of the same colourless, monotonous existence; some
of them were wasted in physical ill-health, some in mental inactivity,
but slowly a manuscript grew and grew again into being.

The slow winter wore away, and the ice froze or the fog pressed on the
long French windows of my room. My father invited me to run over and
spend Christmas with him, but I dreaded the interruption and the delay
in the work. I stayed and pressed forward with it, and in the last days
of March the whole book stood complete.

It was one of the first nights of May. The first warm, spring-like
night of the season, and the seats at the Concert des Ambassadeurs were
crowded by the Parisians consuming their brandied cherries under the
canopy of fluttering light green leaves of the opening limes. I sat,
one of the audience, and heard the band clashing, and watched the
dancers flit on and off the glittering diminutive stage, with
indifferent eyes and ears.

I was thinking of my success. The band might thunder its hardest, but
it could not drown the publisher's voice in my ears, which repeated
over and over the words I had heard that morning. "Yes, M'sieur, your
book has been accepted. We