pers."

"Destroyed them?" I faltered.

"Yes; what was I to keep them for? I burned them last night, one by one,
in the kitchen."

"One by one?" I repeated, mechanically.

"It took a long time--there were so many." The room seemed to go round
me as she said this, and a real darkness for a moment descended upon my
eyes. When it passed Miss Tita was there still, but the transfiguration
was over and she had changed back to a plain, dingy, elderly person.
It was in this character she spoke as she said, "I can't stay with you
longer, I can't;" and it was in this character that she turned her back
upon me, as I had turned mine upon her twenty-four hours before, and
moved to the door of her room. Here she did what I had not done when I
quitted her--she paused long enough to give me one look. I have never
forgotten it and I sometimes still suffer from it, though it was not
resentful. No, there was no resentment, nothing hard or vindictive in
poor Miss Tita; for when, later, I sent her in exchange for the portrait
of Jeffrey Aspern a larger sum of money than I had hoped to be able to
gather for her, writing to her that I had sold the picture, she kept it
with thanks; she never sent it back. I wrote to her that I had sold the
picture, but I admitted to Mrs. Prest, at the time (I met her in London,
in the autumn), that it hangs above my writing table. When I look at it
my chagrin at the loss of the letters becomes almost intolerable.

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