Those letters were a revelation. They seemed to me the sort of letters that Helen could never have written, but perhaps that is the usual experience of outsiders who read other people's love-letters. Yes, they were love-letters, except that the description is a shade too temperate.... And—to put the matter quite frankly—they were not the wayward, semi-harmless chits that a married woman might send to a young exile in whom she was sentimentally interested. They were, on the contrary, highly damaging and incriminating documents; and all the time I was reading them I was picturing a packed Divorce Court in which some cool, smooth-voiced advocate (like Severn) was doling them out, sentence by sentence, and pausing with uplifted eyebrows at the end of each.

The earliest of the trio had evidently been written and posted within a few hours of that quarrel with me in the Fleet Street tea-shop. There was, of course, no mention of it in the letter, and at least half the sentences were indignant questions. For instance:

"... Terry, what does your scrappy little note really mean? Why have you gone after all? What need was there for you to go? I feel dazed by it, so far; I cannot understand how or why you could have done it, after what we had arranged. Surely it was wonderful enough for us to be together, meeting so often, and with all the summer before us that we had planned—how could you dare to break it all to pieces by going away? Terry, I'm angry with you—I did think you would keep your word to me. Tell me what made you go—tell me why. And for God's sake, if you find there's nothing for you in Vienna, have the courage to come back. I'm frightened to think of you with that man Karelsky—he seems to me to be everything you'll never guess he is till it's too late.... Oh, you are a fool for running away like this—it was our wonderful chance, and you've bungled all of it. I don't know whether I can ever forgive you...."

A pause of ten days, and then the next, evidently in answer to a letter from him:

"Your letter arrived this morning at breakfast-time. Geoffrey said: 'Who's it from?', and I said: 'It's from Terry, saying he's arrived safely and is settling down.' Then he said 'Good!' in a loud voice, and I felt I wanted to knife him for saying 'good' when everything was so bad.... Terry, it's almost killing me to think that I could have had you that last night if only I had had the courage. I wish to God I had had, but what's the good of that to me now? Terry, there were difficulties—money and so on—and you oughtn't to have thought I didn't love you enough, just because I didn't agree straightway. I love you enough for anything, and I know it now that you've gone.... I just feel I can't endure it—it's inhuman of you to give me no second chance—and yet you always were like that, I know. Everything or nothing—and now, I suppose, it's nothing.... What you say about being sorry shows how different you are; I'm not sorry, except that I didn't seize the chance when it was offered me...."

And as a postscript the single sentence: "I don't think I can ever live without you, and you know what I mean by living, don't you?"

The third and last letter was the longest. Dated almost exactly a calendar month after Terry's departure, it began:

"Your letter made me feel that I shall never want to write to you again, and if, as you threaten, you don't reply to this, I certainly shan't. What sort of a man are you that you can change so quickly? Your letter might have been written by a parson—or did you, perhaps, get some parson to collaborate with you? Please let me inform you that the old Terry that I loved, and that I love still, was the only man on earth who could ever have made me 'live usefully,' and that the new Terry, with his moralisings and platitudes, only makes me feel I want to go straight to the Devil. How dare you mention Geoffrey's career as a reason why I should sacrifice my happiness? And even June—what has she got to do with it? I suppose you think that the 'che-ild' comes in rather usefully, or else your parson collaborator put you up to the idea.... As for your work—devote yourself to it by all means, but why should you try to make me believe that you can't have more than one thing in life? My advice to you (since you have given yours so plentifully to me) is to marry some Viennese girl who loves you and is also a business woman—someone who'll stop you from making an utter fool of yourself. I go white with rage when I read over parts of your letter. What do you mean by saying that love dies soon when the mind is occupied by work? Does yours? Mine doesn't. And what do you mean by talking of your great sin? There was no sin, and if what might have been is a sin, then it was I and not you who stopped short of it. Not that I want any credit for that.... I can't understand you. I can't understand how you could behave as you did that night and then, a month later, send me a sermon. I don't feel that it is you—the real you—that wrote me that letter at all, but somebody else—somebody I have never known. Did you ever really love me at all, I wonder, or was it, on your side, merely the passion you now profess to be ashamed of? It wasn't that on my side; I really loved you, more than I could love anybody else in the world; I loved even your work and your ideals because they were yours.... I don't feel ashamed, and you do, and there's an end of it...."

X

While I was reading over that last letter for the second time, Mizzi came in. She had seen the light through the window, and had wondered who could be staying up so late. We shook hands gravely, and she said that the porter had told her of our return, and that she was not altogether surprised since Buda-Pesth in midsummer was so hot and—and unheimlich. That—her using a German word instead of puzzling out an English one—showed me that she was perturbed; and when she asked me how Terry was, a sudden impulse made me place a chair for her opposite to mine and tell her everything about him. Everything. And also I showed her the letters.