ut I thought of her afterwards. I thought of her a
good deal in a quiet way after I had left her--so much so that I made a
special journey to Ravengar's a few days afterwards, when there was no
real need for me to go, in order to have a look at her face again. I
should explain that I was dabbling in finance just then, fairly
successfully, and had transactions with Ravengar. He didn't know that I
was the son of the man who had taken his stepmother away from his
father, and I never told him I had changed my name, because the scandals
attached to it by Ravengar and his father had made things very
unpleasant for any bearer of that name. Still, Ravengar happened to be
the man I wanted to deal with, and so I didn't let any stupid resentment
on my part stop me from dealing with him. He was a scoundrel, but he
played the game, I may incidentally mention. I venture to give this
frank opinion about one of your most important clients, because he'll be
dead before you read this, Polycarp. At least, I expect so.

Well, the day I called specially with a view to seeing her she was not
there. She had left Ravengar's employment, and disappeared. Ravengar
seemed to be rather perturbed about it. But perhaps he was perturbed
about the suicide which had recently taken place in his office. I felt
it--I mean I felt her disappearance. However, the memory of her face
gave me something very charming to fall back on in moments of
depression, and it was at this time something occurred sufficient to
make me profoundly depressed for the remainder of my life. I was over in
Paris, and seeing a good deal of Darcy, my friend the English doctor
there. We were having a long yarn one night in his rooms over the Cafe
Americain, and he said to me suddenly: 'Look here, old chap, I'm going
to do something very unprofessional, because I fancy you'll thank me for
it.' He said it just like that, bursting out all of a sudden. So I said,
'Well?' He said: 'It's very serious, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine
cases out of a thousand I should be a blundering idiot to tell you.' I
said to him: 'You've begun. Finish. And let's see whether I'll thank
you.' He then told me that I'd got malignant disease of the heart, might
die at any moment, and in any case couldn't live more than a few years.
He said: 'I thought you'd like to know, so that you could arrange your
life accordingly.' I thanked him. I was really most awfully obliged to
him. It wanted some pluck to tell me.