[CHAPTER XX.]
THE HARVEST OF TARES.
ERCY returned to the Hotel, and before taking the train for New York, he wrote Helena a letter. Its contents were as follows:
"My Queen:
"All my life I have worshiped an ideal. Just when I had grown to believe, that she did not exist save in my dreams, you flashed upon my horizon. I loved you; but I have not dared dream that you would love me, until to-day. I saw it in your face, dear, and I know that you are a woman who, once loving, will love forever. You know the story of my life. I am going abroad very soon. I shall remain away, until this miserable experience of which I told you, this terrible error, becomes a thing of the past. I shall strive to make myself worthy of your respect, of your love. When I come back, I shall ask you to be my wife, Helena. Until then, farewell. Read the verses I enclose. I found them in the poet's corner of one of our daily papers, and cut them out, because they seemed like a versified history of my own life. First, the mirage dream—then the jungle of the senses, then the cold world of fashion, until I lost faith in the existence of the storied Land of Love.
"Then I met you, and you taught me that the true kingdom of love lies in the precincts of a pure home. Farewell, my sweet saint, my angel guide.
"Percy Durand."
The poem he enclosed we give below.