etimes and started down
that wild grey gorge in the early morning light. I walked to Sachseln,
caught an early train to Lucerne and went on in the afternoon to Como.
And there I stayed in the sunshine taking a boat and rowing alone far up
the lake and lying in it, thinking of love and friendship and the
accidents and significance of my life, and for the most part not
thinking at all but feeling, feeling the glow of our meeting and the
finality of our separation, as one feels the clear glow of a sunset when
the wind rises and the cold night draws near. Everything was pervaded by
the sense of her. Just over those mountains, I thought, is Mary. I was
alone in my boat, but her presence filled the sky. It seemed to me that
at any moment I could go to her. And the last vestige of any cloud
between us for anything we had done or failed to do in these crises of
distress and separation, had vanished and gone altogether.

In the afternoon I wrote to Rachel. I had not written to her for three
days, and even now I told her nothing of my meeting with Mary. I had not
written partly because I could not decide whether I should tell her of
that or not; in the end I tried to hide it from her. It seemed a little
thing in regard to her, a thing that could not hurt her, a thing as
detached from her life and as inconsecutive as a dream in my head.

Three days later I reached Milan, a day before the formal opening of the
Peace Congress. But I found a telegram had come that morning to the
Poste Restante to banish all thought of my pacific mission from my
mind. It came from Paris and its blue ribbon of text ran:

_"Come back at once to London. Justin has been told of our meeting
and is resolved upon divorce. Will do all in my power to explain
and avert but feel you should know at once."_

There are some things so monstrously destructive to all we hold dear
that for a time it is impossible to believe them. I remember now that as
I read that amazing communication through--at the first reading it was a
little difficult to understand because the Italian operator had guessed
at one or two of the words, no real sense of its meaning came to me.
That followed sluggishly. I felt as one might feel when one opens some
offensive anonymous letter or hears some preposterous threat.

"What _nonsense_!" I said, faint-heartedly. I stood for a time at my
bedroom window trying to shake this fact altogether off my mind. But it
stayed, and be