"Ah! forgive me, chère Madame," he answered. "But that is precisely what I need, what I desire—just that—to return, to come back; and to come back by your invitation, at your calling. I ask nothing better, nothing else."
He spread out his hands, leaning sideways in his chair, looking at her.
"Forgive me. I am very stupid, incoherent; but the events of the last three weeks are still so vividly present to me that they confuse and distract me. I cannot see my way clearly. I find it difficult to tell you what is necessary, just what I should. See, then, it had been the habit of my cousin to keep a journal daily from early childhood. The last volume of that journal she had, I found, left as a legacy to me. Her sister gave it to me after the funeral. I took it back with me to London. The night was wet, and I was in no humor for amusement. I remained indoors, in my room at the hotel. The sinister fears which I entertained in connection with my cousin's death had not been allayed by my visit to Stourmouth. A certain mystery appeared to surround the circumstances attending it. I perceived a great unwillingness to answer my inquiries on the part of those most nearly concerned. That night, after dinner, I opened the packet containing the journal, unwillingly, I own; I would rather have delayed. But I could not do so. With the muffled roar of the ceaseless London traffic in my ears I sat and read the journal from cover to cover. Having once begun, I could not leave off. I did not go to bed that night. In the morning early I left London. I left England. I traveled. I hardly know where I went, Madame. I wanted to escape. I wanted to get away from every person I knew, whom I had ever seen. Above all I wanted to get away from myself; but I was obliged to take myself along with me. And I found myself a dreadful companion. I hated myself."
Madame St. Leger moved slightly in her gilded chair.
"My poor friend!" she murmured almost inaudibly.
"Yes, I hated myself," Adrian repeated. "That journal is the most poignant, the most convincing human document I have ever read. My cousin had the misfortune to love a person who did not return her affection. In the pages of her journal, with uncompromising truthfulness, with appalling self-scrutiny, self-revelation and unflinching courage, with, I may add, the amazing abandon possible only to a rigidly virtuous woman, she has recorded the successive phases of that love, from its first unsuspected and almost unconscious inception to the hour when by an act of will, so extraordinary as to be little short of miraculous, she sent her soul out of her body, across land and sea, in pursuit of the man whom she loved and forced from his own lips the confession of his indifference to her."
Again Madame St. Leger moved slightly.
"You tell me this soberly, Mr. Savage?" she asked. "In good faith?"
Adrian looked fixedly at her. Her beautiful face, her whole attitude, was tense with excitement.
"In absolute good faith, Madame," he replied. "I have not only the detailed testimony of her journal, but the perfectly independent and equally detailed testimony of the person whom she loved. The two statements agree in every particular."