for
much of it, it appears, even now. Oh. John, he will never understand.
I want so much to see you, to talk to you--there are times when I am
actually afraid to be alone, and without you. If it be weakness to
confess that I need your reassurance, your strength and comfort
constantly, then I am weak. I once thought I could stand alone, that
I had solved all problems for myself, but I know now how foolish I was.
I have been face to face with such dreadful, unimagined things, and in my
ignorance I did not conceive that life held such terrors. And when I
look at my father, the thought of immortality turns me faint. After you
have come here this afternoon there can be no longer any reason why we
should not meet, and all the world know it. I will go with you to Mr.
Bentley's.

"Of course I need not tell you that I refused to inherit anything. But
I believe I should have consented if I possibly could have done so. It
seemed so cruel--I can think of no other word--to have, to refuse at such
a moment. Perhaps I have been cruel to him all my life--I don't know.
As I look back upon everything, all our relations, I cannot see how I
could have been different. He wouldn't let me. I still believe to have
stayed with him would have been a foolish and useless sacrifice . . .
But he looked at me so queerly, as though he, too, had had a glimmering
of what we might have been to each other after my mother died. Why is
life so hard? And why are we always getting glimpses of things when it
is too late? It is only honest to say that if I had it to do all over
again, I should have left him as I did.

"It is hard to write you this, but he actually made the condition of my
acceptance of the inheritance that I should not marry you. I really do
not believe I convinced him that you wouldn't have me take the money
under any circumstances. And the dreadful side of it all was that I had
to make it plain to him--after what has happened that my desire to marry
you wasn't the main reason of my refusal. I had to tell him that even
though you had not been in question, I couldn't have taken what he wished
to give me, since it had not been honestly made. He asked me why I went
on eating the food bought with such money, living under his roof? But I
cannot, I will not leave him just yet . . . . It is two o'clock. I
cannot write any more to-night."

II

The appointed time was at the November dusk, hurried forward nearly an
hour by the falling panoply o