Here were belated requests for help or advice, calculations
of majorities and prophecies of victory, written at the last moment in
unquenchable faith, to be read now with a weary smile of irony. Here too
were honest, admiring condolences. "Better luck next time"--"Never
despair," and so forth--side by side with anonymous and scurrilous
gloatings over his fall. Once he laughed out loud: a zealous student
compared him at length and in detail to Cleon, and ended with an ode of
triumph which, he said, would appear in the press the next day or so.
Medland pushed the heap away with an impatient sigh, but one note
remained under his hand and he took it up, for it seemed different from
the rest. He undid the envelope and glanced at the signature; then he
sat up in sudden interest, for it was signed "Alicia Derosne."

"You will be surprised," she said, "that I should write; but I doubted
if you understood the other night, and I can't be misunderstood by you.
If you were what I once thought you, I would do all you ask, whatever it
cost me, but I can't now. It's all different now. That thing makes it
all different. You will think it a poor reason and a strange idea--I
know you will; but your thinking it strange is just what makes it
strongest to me. You may not understand--I'm afraid you won't--but you
must believe that that is the only thing. Please don't try to see me,
but send one line to say you believe me.--ALICIA DEROSNE. Good-bye."

At first he thought of what he read only as a fresh defeat, another drop
of bitterness in a brimming cup, and he let the letter fall, despising
himself for caring about such a matter. But he took it up again and
re-read it, and the "Good-bye" at the end--the stifled cry of
pain--touched him; she had finished the letter before she wrote that,
for its ink was paler; the rest had dried, that had been hastily
blotted; it was an after-impulse, a hint of the struggle with which she
left her tenderness unexpressed. He pictured so well how she looked
writing it, making her sacrifice at the altar of what she held holy in
herself. Whether she were right or wrong seemed now to his softer mood
to be of little moment. He could not think that she was right, and yet
it suited her so well to be wrong on such a point that he could hardly
wish her to have been what to his mind seemed right. With the strange
feeling of the end of things, of finality, that his defeat and
despondency had brought to him, her decision