o strangely, so coaxingly, with
Carlotta's eyes and Carlotta's gestures. I asked her yesterday to come
back to me. I said that the house was empty; that the rooms ached for
the want of her. I pleaded so passionately and the eyes before me so
melted that I thought her heart was touched. But in the midst of it all
another visitor came up and the creature uttered a whining plaint and
put out her paw for buns--by which token I felt indeed that it was
Carlotta.

I have accepted the blow silently. As yet I have told no one. I have
made no inquiries. When a man is betrayed by his best friend and
deserted by the woman he loves, time and solitude are the only
comforters. Besides, to whom should I go for comfort? I have lived too
remote from my kind, and my kind heeds me not.

Not a line has reached me from Carlotta. She has gone out of my life as
lightly and as remorselessly as she went out of Hamdi Effendi's; as she
went, for aught she knew, out of that of the unhappy boy who lured her
from Alexandretta. If she heard I was dead, I wonder whether she would
say: "I am so glad!"

Whether the flight was planned between them, or whether Pasquale waylaid
her on her way to the Avenue Road and then and there proposed that she
should accompany him, I do not know. It matters very little. She is
gone. That is the one awful fact that signifies. No explanations, pleas
for forgiveness could make me suffer less. Were she different I might
find it in my heart to hate her. This I cannot do. How can one hate
a thing devoid of heart and soul? But one can love it--God knows how
blindly. So I have locked the door of Carlotta's room and the key is in
my possession. It shall not be touched. It shall remain just as she left
it--and I shall mourn for her as for one dead.

For Pasquale--if I were of his own reversionary type, I should follow
him half across Europe till we met, and then one of us would kill the
other. In one respect he resembles Carlotta. He is destitute of the
moral sense. How else to solve the enigma? How else to reconcile his
flamboyant chivalry towards the consumptive washer-woman with the black
treachery towards me, in which even at that very moment his mind must
have been steeped? I knew that he had betrayed many, that where women
were concerned no considerations of honour or friendship had stood
between him and his desires; but I believed--for what reason save my own
egregious vanity, I know not--that for me he had a peculia