“Tell me that you love me!” I cried.
She shook her head.
“I am not your equal,” she said. “You have been the one who has made me good, if I am good at all. Didn’t you say that I would be capable of any sacrifice for love?”
“Why, yes,” I said.
“Hush,” she whispered and laid her hand on mine.
The next day she had disappeared. No one knew when or how or where she had gone. She had vanished. She left no word. Her room was empty. And there on the tiled floor, in the sunlight, was the rosette from a woman’s slipper. It spoke of haste, of farewell; it was enough to convince me that Margaret was not a creature of my imagination. But the little tawdry decoration, and the faint aroma of her individual fragrance which still clung to it, was all that was left of her and my selfish dreams.
I traveled all the capitals in search of her or of Mrs. Welstoke, to no purpose. My resources dwindled. The wheel and the cards mocked my attempts to repair my state. Fortune had dangled salvation in front of me, had snatched it away, and now laughed at my attempts to put myself in funds. I was shut off from a search for my happiness. When I had played to gain money for my damnation, as if with the assistance of the Evil One, I had won; now that I sought regeneration, a malicious fiend conducted the game and ruined me.
I remember of thinking how I had begun life with full assurance of my power over all the world and, above all, over myself. I was sitting on a chair on the pavement in front of a miserable little café at Brest, looking down at my worn-out shoes.
“Well,” said I, aloud, “some absinthe—a day of forgetfulness—and then—I will begin life anew.”
It was the same old tricky promise—the present lying to the future and making everything seem right.