the two should part undemonstratively.

Paul, as he walked to his own more pretentious hostel, recognised the
fact that for good or evil he had shot his bolt There was nothing at
that hour of which he was more certain than that his present destiny and
the destiny of Madge lay in the hands of a woman he had never seen,
and he did not even attempt to disguise from himself the overwhelming
probability against an affirmative answer to his hopes. He was very
miserably certain that he had no right to hope, and that accusing
conscience of his which never permitted him to stray without rebuke, and
yet had never been worth a farthing to him in his whole career, worried
him without ceasing. But he knew enough of himself already to have
learned that the fault of character which had wrecked him was half
made up of reluctance to add pain to pain. It is not always the wholly
selfish wrongdoer who is answerable for the greater sorrows of life. It
is assuredly not he who suffers in his own person; but, worse than that,
the tender-hearted, conscience-worried man of feeble will is always
afraid of causing a slight grief by retracing a mistaken step, and so
goes on inevitably to the creation of troubles which appal him when he
comes to contemplate them in after-hours. And to have a full theoretical
knowledge of this fact enforced by years of experience is to be
gifted with no safeguard. 'To be weak'--there is no wiser saying among
the utterances of the wise--'to be weak is to be miserable.' To be a
fool and to know it is the extreme of misery, and this extreme does not
fall to the lot of those who are extremest in folly.

What Paul wrote that night is barely worth chronicling, and may be
fairly constructed by anyone who has so far pursued his story. But the
Exile, sitting over the embers of the fire at which he had cooked his
coarse mid-day meal, threw himself backward on the trodden grass,
and, groping behind the flap of the tent, dragged his brown canvas bag
towards him, and having made a search among its contents, found a heap
of stained, crumpled and disordered papers, one of which he smoothed
out upon his knee and read. It had been given to him in that first
unspeakably tranquil and happy year which Madge and he had spent
together in Europe. It was the first blotted draft of the letter to her
mother with which she had accompanied his own, and it ran thus:

'My darling Mother,

'I am putting this into a separate envelope, and on th