It came back upon me that evening, his image, and I knew that I hated him still. I took up the letter with a feeling of revolt and disgust, as if it had been a filthy object, broke it open, and read:—

"DEAR VICTOR,—I expect you will say to yourself it is the greatest cheek my writing to you, and I know it is, but I am reduced to that state of desperation when a man ceases to feel degradation."

"I am writing to ask you for help—you will wonder how I can. So do I. I wonder at myself. But I know you are the best of fellows, and I feel you will help me now in spite of all that has happened. Victor send me what you can, as near 15 Pounds Sterling as possible, to save me from irrevocable disgrace. I have no one but yourself to apply to. If you refuse I am done for. You will know what a desperate position I am in, I must be in, to ask you at all.—Yours in despair and everlasting regret, HOWARD."

I read it through, and then dropped the letter and its envelope into the fire, glad to get rid of the sight of the familiar hand. And I watched it burn, and I thought of the manuscript which must have curled and writhed in the same way, leaf by leaf, as he lighted it, and I asked myself again—What is forgiveness?

I knew that I hated him. I had now the opportunity of consigning him to "irrevocable disgrace," as he put it. But I knew that I should send him the help he asked for on the same principle as I had refrained from injuring him, forgiven him, shaken hands with him. And why? I wondered. What was my motive? Simply, I think, a mere instinct to preserve my own self-respect.

I enclosed a cheque for 20 Pounds Sterling in a blank sheet of paper, put it in an envelope, and went out that same night and posted it. When I had his letter of thanks I glanced through it hastily and then burnt it, and tried to stamp out the re-awakened memory of him from my brain. Weeks followed weeks of the same colourless, monotonous existence; some of them were wasted in physical ill-health, some in mental inactivity, but slowly a manuscript grew and grew again into being.

The slow winter wore away, and the ice froze or the fog pressed on the long French windows of my room. My father invited me to run over and spend Christmas with him, but I dreaded the interruption and the delay in the work. I stayed and pressed forward with it, and in the last days of March the whole book stood complete.

It was one of the first nights of May. The first warm, spring-like night of the season, and the seats at the Concert des Ambassadeurs were crowded by the Parisians consuming their brandied cherries under the canopy of fluttering light green leaves of the opening limes. I sat, one of the audience, and heard the band clashing, and watched the dancers flit on and off the glittering diminutive stage, with indifferent eyes and ears.

I was thinking of my success. The band might thunder its hardest, but it could not drown the publisher's voice in my ears, which repeated over and over the words I had heard that morning. "Yes, M'sieur, your book has been accepted. We shall hope to bring it out in September."

I sat there at peace with all the world. Howard was entirely forgiven now; my father's treatment forgotten. Let the past go. What did anything matter? And I tapped my stick on the flooring at the end of the songs I had barely heard, out of sheer good humour, and swallowed the second-rate brandy and smoked an infamous cigar with imperturbable complacence; and as I got up with the mass at the finale I heard my nearest neighbour's remark to his companion, which might be freely translated thus: