wished to say
something more. But he changed his mind, and kept his own counsel.

An hour later Bernardine left Petershof. Only the concierge of the
Kurhaus saw her off at the station.

CHAPTER XX.

A LOVE-LETTER.

TWO days after Bernardine had left Petershof, the snows began to melt.
Nothing could be drearier than that process: nothing more desolate than
the outlook.

The Disagreeable Man sat in his bedroom trying to read Carpenter's
Anatomy. It failed to hold him. Then he looked out of the window, and
listened to the dripping of the icicles. At last he took a pen, and
wrote as follows:

"LITTLE COMRADE, LITTLE PLAYMATE."

"I could not believe that you were really going. When you first said
that you would soon be leaving, I listened with unconcern, because it
did not seem possible that the time could come when we should not be
together; that the days would come and go, and that I should not know
how you were; whether you were better, and more hopeful about your life
and your work, or whether the old misery of indifference and ill-health
was still clinging to you; whether your voice was strong as of one who
had slept well and felt refreshed, or whether it was weak like that of
one who had watched through the long night.

"It did not seem possible that such a time could come. Many cruel things
have happened to me, as to scores of others, but this is the most cruel
of all. Against my wish and against my knowledge, you have crept into my
life as a necessity, and now I have to give you up. You are better, God
bless you, and you go back to a fuller life, and to carry on your work,
and to put to account those talents which no one realises more than I do;
and as for myself, God help me, I am left to wither away.

"You little one, you dear little one, I never wished to love you. I had
never loved any one, never drawn near to any one. I have lived lonely
all my young life; for I am only a young man yet. I said to myself time
after time: 'I will not love her. It will not do me any good, nor her
any good.' And then in my state of health, what right had I to think of
marriage, and making a home for myself? Of course that was out of the
question. And then I thought, that because I was a doomed man, cut off
from the pleasures which make a lovely thing of life, it did not follow
that I might not love you in my own quiet way, hugging my secret to
myself, until the love became all the greater because it was my secret.
I