"And so—what can I have to say to you, Athalie? Silence were decenter perhaps—God knows!—and He knows, too, that in me he fashioned but an irresolute character, void of the initial courage of conviction, without deep and sturdy belief, unsteady to a true course set, and lacking in rugged purpose.
"It is not stupidity: in the bottom of my own heart I know! Custom, habit, acquired and inculcated acquiescence in unanalysed beliefs—these require more than irresolution and a negative disposition to fight them and overcome them.
"Athalie, the news you must have read in the newspapers should first have come from me. Among many, many debts I must ever owe you, that one at least was due you. And I defaulted; but not through any fault of mine.
"I could not rest until you knew this. Whatever you may think about me now—however lightly you weigh me—remember this—if you ever remember me at all in the years to come: I was aware of my
paramount debt: I should have paid it had the opportunity not been taken out of my own hands. And that debt paramount was to inform you first of anybody concerning what you read in a public newspaper.
"Now there remains nothing more for me to say that you would care to hear. You would no longer care to know,—would probably not believe me if I should tell you what you have been to me—and still are—and still are, Athalie! Athalie!—"
The letter ended there with her name. She kept it all day; but that night she destroyed it. And it was a week before she wrote him:
"—Thank you for your letter, Clive. I hope all is well with you and yours. I wish you happiness; I desire for you all things good. And also—for her. Surely I may say this much without offence—when I am saying good-bye forever.
"Athalie."
In due time, to this came his answer, tragic in its brevity, terrible in its attempt to say nothing—so that its stiff cerement of formality seemed to crack with every written word and its platitudes split open under the fierce straining of the living and unwritten words beneath them.