the window and gave an address to the man. Then she
turned to Jacob. She was very pale but her eyes were ablaze.

"I just want to tell you," she said, "that from the bottom of my heart
I hate and detest you."

The car glided away, and Jacob walked across the Square towards a
taxicab stand.

CHAPTER XIV

Jacob, on the following morning, received a pencilled epistle from
Sybil which brought him little satisfaction. There was no orthodox
commencement, and it was written on sheets of paper torn apparently
from a block:

I have been asking myself, on my way into exile--where I am
going to stay with some pestilential relatives in
Devonshire--exactly why I dislike you more and more every
time we come into contact with one another, and I have come
to the conclusion that it is because in our controversies
you are nearly always right and I am nearly always wrong. I
suppose, as a matter of fact, I haven't the slightest
reason in harbouring ill-will against you for refusing to
put your money into the business which my father had
allowed to become derelict. I am quite sure that you gave
me good advice when you told me to keep away from those men
who tried to rob you. In short, you are always right and I
am always wrong, and I hate you all the more for it.

I shall not return to London for at least a good many
months. During that time I do beg that you will sit down
and forget all about me. Have an affair with Grace, if you
like, flirt with any one you want to, or, better still, get
married. But I tell you honestly that it absolutely
irritates and angers me to be made conscious of your--shall
I call it devotion? There is something antagonistic between
us. I don't know what it is, but I do know that I shall
never change. And I beg you, therefore, to do as I ask
you--forget that such a person exists.

You may think that because I have admitted as much as I
have admitted, that it has changed my feelings towards you.
It has not. It never could. I am boiling over with passion
at the present moment when I think how you treated our plot
with contempt and walked out of it with the air of a
conqueror. I am going to bury myself in Devonshire, partly
because I have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go,
but partly so that I may not have the misfortune to see
anyt