"If you want my kisses, come. For anything more, I am no longer good enough.
"Lilly."
The clock struck eleven. Adele had gone to bed. She would have to go down herself to drop the letter in the box. But the long-threatened storm just then burst in fury. Hailstones rattled down, and gusts of wind rushed through the open windows, scattering raindrops on the writing-table. The paper on which her dry feverish eyes were fixed became wet; it looked as if she had drenched it with her tears.
"That is a happy coincidence," she thought. Then she was ashamed. The time for acting was surely over. But as she settled herself to rewrite the letter she stopped, shuddering in horror. What was to be gained by such a monstrous indictment of self? And was it, after all, the truth? In the slanderous mouth, perhaps, of a back-biting woman who twists out of bare facts evidence of crime against a friend, or in that of one of those social hangmen who have a halter ready for every past. She alone knew how it had all come about. How from inner necessity and outer compulsion, from too-confiding trustfulness and unprotected innocence link by link the chain had been forged, which now clanked its weight of guilt about her limbs. She, at least, knew that there was another less harsh and hideous truth, which would excuse and purify her in the eyes of any sympathetic person.
So she tore up the sheet of notepaper and began again. She made a rough copy, and then polished and polished till it satisfied her.
Now the letter ran:
"Dearest and beloved Friend,
"She who writes you these lines is a most unfortunate woman, whom you really know very little about, and who had to deceive you until to-day because all that is most sacred to her--her love for you--was at stake. And now, by writing this, that also is lost! I sacrifice it on the altar of your happiness for the sake of the divine fire that flashes from your eyes, consecrating and ennobling my soul.
"The world has treated me cruelly. It has wrenched from me by degrees my faith in human nature, my ideals, my buoyancy of spirit; it has brought me to sin, and so robbed me of the right to continue my journey through life at your side.
"I set out once on that journey full of confidence and hopefulness, and pure to the very core of my being. But every man I was destined to meet plucked off a twig of my virtue. I lifted my eyes in adoring reverence to the aged husband who promised to be my hero and master, my pattern and god. He used me as a tool for his basest lusts.