It seemed, until his scientific curiosity was aroused by the seeming, that he wrote with his heart's blood. After the curiosity awoke, the heart's blood was only highly-coloured water.
"Look here. I can't stand it any longer. I'm a brute and I know it, and I know you'll think so. The fact is I've fallen in love with your Harry, and I simply can't bear it seeing her every day almost and knowing she's yours and not mine" (there the analytic demon pricked up its ears and the scratching of the pen ceased). "I have fought against this," the letter went on after a long pause. "You don't know how I've fought, but it's stronger than I am. I love her—impossibly, unbearably—the only right and honourable thing to do is to go away, and I'm going. My only hope is that she'll never know.
"Your old friend."
As he scrawled the signatory hieroglyphic, his only hope was that she would know it, and that the knowledge would leaven, with tenderly pitying thoughts of him, the heroic figure, her happiness with Tom, the commonplace.
He addressed and stamped the envelope; but he did not close it.
"I might want to put in another word or two," he said to himself. And even then in his inmost heart he hardly knew that he was going to her. He knew it when he was driving towards Chenies Street, and then he told himself that he was going to bid her good-bye—for ever.
Angel and devil were so busy shifting the curtain to and fro that he could not see any scene clearly.
He came into her presence pale with his resolution to be noble, to leave her for ever to happiness—and Tom. It was difficult though, even at that supreme moment, to look at her and to couple those two ideas.
"I've come to say good-bye," he said.
"Good-bye?" the dismay in her eyes seemed to make that unsealed letter leap in his side pocket.
"Yes—I'm going—circumstances I can't help—I'm going away for a long time."