you. It was really me made him. It's a tragedy, but it would be a
bigger tragedy if we didn't, for we belong to one another. And he's
taking me to Paris to live so as nobody need know anything about
it. He's got a post in a shop there. And we're starting on a
Saturday so as you can have Sunday to turn round in.

You'll forgive me, Ranny dear. It's what I've always told you--you
shouldn't have married me. You should have married a girl like
Winny. She was always fond of you. It was a lie what I told you
once about her not being. I said it because I was mad on you, and I
knew you'd marry her if I let you alone. So you can say it's all my
fault, if you like.

Yours truly,

[she had hesitated, with some erasures, over the form of
valedictions]

Vi.
#/

There was a postscript:

/#
"You can do anything you like to me as long as you don't touch
Leonard. It's not his fault my caring for him more than you."
#/

And in a small hand squeezed into the margin he made out with difficulty
two more lines. "You needn't be afraid of being fond of Baby. There was
never anything between me and Leonard before July of last year."

He did not read it straight through all at once. He stuck at the opening
sentence. It stupefied him. Even when he took it in it did not tell him
plainly what it was that she had done besides going away and not coming
back again. It was as if his mind were unable to deal with more than one
image at a time, as if it refused to admit the hidden significance of
language.

Realization came with the shock of the name that struck at him suddenly
out of the page in a flash that annihilated the context. The name and
his intelligence leaped at each other and struck fire across the
darkness. His gorge rose at it as it would have risen at a foul blow
under the belt.

Leonard Mercier; he saw nothing else; he needed nothing else but that;
it showed him her deed as the abomination that it was. If it had been
any other man he thought he could have borne it, for he might still have
held her clean.

As it was, the uncleanness was such that his mind turned from it
instinctively as from a thing unspeakable. He closed his eyes, he hid
his face in his hands, as if the two had been there with him in the
room. And still he saw things. There rose before him a sort of welter of
gray slime and darkness in which were things visible, things