. Yet, in
spite of this, I cannot bid you hope. I am widowed; and the first
numbness of the unexpected shock has not left me yet. I can say to
you truly, cousin, that I love you: that the comradeship we have
known is something which I shall try to continue while we both
live: though we are far beyond our twenties now, Ivan. But more
than this, more than pure friendship, seems to me impossible.
Marriage--even though it be with the love of my girlhood--is still
half-terrible to me. I think that certain memories of my existence
with Alexis can never be wiped away.

"Am I cruel, dear Ivan? Oh, I so want _not_ to be! But, indeed, I
think I am not yet wholly myself. So I bid you remember that I have
suffered very cruelly from the '_love_' of a man; and I pray you,
for that reason, to try to forgive me when I tell you that
friendship is all I can ever want now: that as a friend I shall
write you; and as a friend _you_ must know,

"Your affectionate, sorrowful,

"NATHALIE D. F."

There are men, perhaps, who would have read hope into this letter and
have clung to it, willy-nilly. Ivan was not of these. Self-deception was
never a vice of his; and, from this hour, the soul of Nathalie Feodoreff
stood revealed to him more clearly than to herself.

Once through the letter he sat motionless, the black-bordered sheet
crushed tightly in his right hand. He had forgotten the paper on which
her words to him were traced. Perhaps he had forgotten the words
themselves. But the throbbing of his heart continued: the veins in his
temples still stood out, like purple whip-cords. It was late in the
night before there appeared, in the dark room, the vision of his
mother's angel-face gazing at him, her clear eyes filled with mingled
love and understanding; and midnight had long struck before that which
he instinctively expected was finally given: when, like a diapason,
crashing, _fortissimo_, through the dark, rolled the magnificent,
despairing chords of the final theme of the great "Tosca Symphony"--the
_motif_, the epitome, of his own, dark life.

CHAPTER XXI

TOSCA REGNANT

During the weeks immediately succeeding this last repulse, Ivan suffered
as he had suffered in the early days of Nathalie's marriage. It was not
easy for him to comprehend why Madame Feodoreff's lette