"P.S.—I will send your photographs and other things to the studio. I should like you to burn mine, but do not send them back. I don't want to look at anything that reminds me of you. Do not be angry—I can't help it. I am so unhappy.
V.
"If you don't go I know I shall be seriously ill."
After reading this letter Harry was probably about a thousand times more in love with Valentia than he had ever been in his life. Indeed, he felt that he had never cared for her before. He pretended even to himself to laugh at it, and walked up and down his room, saying to himself: "What a couple! What a woman! What a man! They're unique. No, they're too wonderful!"
But he didn't succeed in deceiving himself. He knew that letter was final. He did not give it up at once. He wrote her three letters. The first, one of indignant reproach: "You never really cared for me," and so forth, which she did not answer; the second, witty and trivial, with allusions to mountains and molehills and tragedy queens; the third, desperately imploring her to see him once before he went away. To the third one she sent a reply, simply saying—
"Please, please go as soon as possible."
After all his emotion and passionate correspondence it was by this time only about half-past ten. Harry packed, dressed, and went off to the station, mad with rage. He left no word for Romer at all. He felt he had better leave all that to the wife. He had lost her absolutely and for ever—and Miss Walmer too.
In prompt response to his wire Van Buren met him at the station.
And what a wonderful consolation it was to tell him all about it!
Certainly no man ever had a better audience; no one more impressed, shocked, delighted, horrified, amused, grieved, pleased and sympathetic ever listened to a confidence. For Van Buren it was as good as a cause célèbre, a musical comedy, a feuilleton in the Daily Mail and a series of snapshots from the homes of the upper classes—all in one. Never in his life had he heard anything so intensely English. The story gave him the acute, objective, artistic joy that one takes in the best literature, an intellectual pleasure that is usually more or less mingled with the merely spiteful satisfaction that we are accused of taking in the misfortunes of our best friends. And how well Harry told it!