ie sent me to give you," he said, giving it.

The Letters

Just before the letter was brought to me that evening I was watching
the red November sunset from the library window. It was a stormy,
unrestful sunset, gleaming angrily through the dark fir boughs that
were now and again tossed suddenly and distressfully in a fitful gust
of wind. Below, in the garden, it was quite dark, and I could only see
dimly the dead leaves that were whirling and dancing uncannily over
the roseless paths. The poor dead leaves--yet not quite dead! There
was still enough unquiet life left in them to make them restless and
forlorn. They hearkened yet to every call of the wind, who cared for
them no longer but only played freakishly with them and broke their
rest. I felt sorry for the leaves as I watched them in that dull,
weird twilight, and angry--in a petulant fashion that almost made me
laugh--with the wind that would not leave them in peace. Why should
they--and I--be vexed with these transient breaths of desire for a
life that had passed us by?

I was in the grip of a bitter loneliness that evening--so bitter and
so insistent that I felt I could not face the future at all, even with
such poor fragments of courage as I had gathered about me after
Father's death, hoping that they would, at least, suffice for my
endurance, if not for my content. But now they fell away from me at
sight of the emptiness of life.

The emptiness! Ah, it was from that I shrank. I could have faced pain
and anxiety and heartbreak undauntedly, but I could not face that
terrible, yawning, barren emptiness. I put my hands over my eyes to
shut it out, but it pressed in upon my consciousness insistently, and
would not be ignored longer.

The moment when a woman realizes that she has nothing to live
for--neither love nor purpose nor duty--holds for her the bitterness
of death. She is a brave woman indeed who can look upon such a
prospect unquailingly, and I was not brave. I was weak and timid. Had
not Father often laughed mockingly at me because of it?

It was three weeks since Father had died--my proud, handsome,
unrelenting old father, whom I had loved so intensely and who had
never loved me. I had always accepted this fact unresentfully and
unquestioningly, but it had steeped my whole life in its tincture of
bitterness. Father had never forgiven me for two things. I had cost my
mother's life and I was not a son to perpetuate the old name and carry
on