His going was like a flight. His inner cry was this:
"My God! I am absolutely unworthy of her. I am big, coarse and dishonest—unfit to touch her hand."
His gloomy face and bent head was a subject of joke for the acquaintances he met on the street.
"Saddle Susanna," he called sharply to his Mexican hostler. He had made up his mind to radical measures.
As he sat in his room with his face buried in his hands shutting out the light of the splendid sunset, he saw her as she sat among her soft silks and dainty flowers. Her lovely eyes and the exquisite texture of her skin grew more and more wonderful to him. The touch of his lips to hers came to seem an act of pollution, almost of envenoming, as he brooded on his unworthiness.
He wrote a note to her on the impulse of the moment. The missive read:
"I am not fit to see you, to touch you. I am going away across the divide to make restitution for a great wrong I have done. If I do not I can never face you again. When I see you again I will be an honest man, or I—if you think me worthy of forgiveness I will see you and ask it to-morrow.
Richard."
He added as a postscript:
"I am well. I am not crazy, but I am not an honest man. I can't kiss you again till I am."