ence she reposed
in him, that he loved her passionately, adoringly, and without any dream
of hope.

'I will not soil my worship of you by even asking for your forgiveness,'
so he wrote. 'I have told you what I had to tell. There is no longer any
power in me to hide it And now I know that it is good-bye indeed. In the
sorrow and the loneliness which are rightly mine--since I earned them
with much foolish painstaking--I shall never cease to love you, but I
shall not presume to write to you again.'

'My poor Paul,'she wrote back to him, 'what madness!

And how great a cruelty to snatch from me the solace of your friendship
'Forget the madness, dearest friend. Undo the cruelty. Let us bury the
memory of this outburst, let us go back to the past. Alas! did ever man
or woman return to the past? But we must not part in this way. You must
write to me at times. You must let me know of your artistic hopes. You
must give me news of your career.'

He was amazed to find that he was answered at all, and even in his
misery he joyed to find himself reprieved from the sentence his own
conscience had passed upon him. He was still free to write, and he wrote
almost every day, though he sent off his budget only once a week. He did
not make love in the sense of seeking to persuade his goddess to descend
to him, but he made no further disguise of himself, and he was not again
reproved.

This all led to a long space of infertility, and it was stretched still
further by the departure of the Baroness to Paris. There, she wrote
Paul, she would be much in society, and if he should find himself in
the gay city at any time during her stay, she could introduce him to
charming and useful people. But she was very round in her warnings to
him.

'You must not come,'she told him, 'unless you are absolutely sure that
there is no danger of making me absurd in the eyes of my friends. Dearly
as I esteem you, I should never forgive you that. You have been so
very outspoken of late, and I have permitted you to write your heart so
freely, that I should be guilty of the foolishest affectation if I were
silent on this one matter. We cannot control our affections. It is not
given to us to love and dislike at discretion, but we can control our
language and our conduct, and I must exact your promise ere you meet me.
And I will tell you this once, and I will never breathe it any more: Had
we met under happier conditions, had we both been free to choose, I know