Now that I feel so much better, I know that I was ill. Before dinner, I lay down on my bed and slept two unrestful hours. I dreamed that I was climbing toilfully up a stony path between ruinous walls and close-grown ancient thorns. I climbed in a light that was neither of the night nor of the day: in the wan and chilly light of a moon-like sun such as I had seen through the water. And, all the time I climbed, I knew that he was near. Thrice I saw him through the briers, and once he called my name: but he was always at the other side of the wall.
I dreamed much more. But though I couldn't help dreaming, I can help recalling it all, I can keep writing it.
Yet what can I do if I don't write? I can't get to close grips with a book. The end of Les Chouans is too beautiful, too sorrowful, and I've no one to talk to, save Susan. Susan has been an angel all day: but I couldn't talk to her just now. I will go to bed.
Midnight.
The house is quiet as the grave.
I cannot sleep. Perhaps the fire was too restless and bright.
The room is so warm that I am sitting without even a dressing-gown, just as I slipped out of bed. I have a plan of wooing sleep.
I am going to write to Ruddington. Not a reply on behalf of Susan. Not a letter that will ever be posted. Not a letter that any eye save mine shall ever see. Once, just this once, because I am sleepless, and shaken, and worn, and unhappy, I will let myself go. For half an hour, he shall be mine. His rose-leaf, my stolen rose-leaf, shall lie by my hand. To-morrow ... the fire for what I write to-night. And for me--to-morrow and all the morrows after it--no looking back to this hour, no brooding, no idle regret, nothing save the quest of forgetfulness.
This is what I write--the first and last love-letter of my life:
SAINT VERONICA'S,
at dead of night.