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It was his last day with her, and he was feeling very hopeless and happy.

“You ought to write a book about him,” she went on gently.

Danyers started; he was beginning to dislike Rendle’s way of walking in unannounced.

“You ought to do it,” she insisted. “A complete interpretation–a summing- up of his style, his purpose, his theory of life and art. No one else could do it as well.”

He sat looking at her perplexedly. Suddenly–dared he guess?

“I couldn’t do it without you,” he faltered.

“I could help you–I would help you, of course.”

They sat silent, both looking at the lake.

It was agreed, when they parted, that he should rejoin her six weeks later in Venice. There they were to talk about the book.

III

Lago d’Iseo, August 14th.

When I said good-by to you yesterday I promised to come back to Venice in a week: I was to give you your answer then. I was not honest in saying that; I didn’t mean to go back to Venice or to see you again. I was running away from you–and I mean to keep on running! If you won’t, I must. Somebody must save you from marrying a disappointed woman of–well, you say years don’t count, and why should they, after all, since you are not to marry me?

That is what I dare not go back to say. You are not to marry me. We have had our month together in Venice (such a good month, was it not?) and now you are to go home and write a book–any book but the one we–didn’t talk of!–and I am to stay here, attitudinizing among my memories like a sort of female Tithonus. The dreariness of this enforced immortality!

But you shall know the truth. I care for you, or at least for your love, enough to owe you that.

You thought it was because Vincent Rendle had loved me that there was so little hope for you. I had had what I wanted to the full; wasn’t that what you said? It is just when a man begins to think he understands a woman that he may be sure he doesn’t! It is because Vincent Rendle didn’t love me that there is no hope for you. I never had what I wanted, and never, never, never will I stoop to wanting anything else.

Do you begin to understand? It was all a sham then, you say? No, it was all real as far as it went. You are young–you haven’t learned, as you will later, the thousand imperceptible signs by which one gropes one’s way through the labyrinth of human nature; but didn’t it strike you, sometimes, that I never told you any foolish little anecdotes about him? His trick, for instance, of twirling a paper-knife round and round between his thumb and forefinger while he talked; his mania for saving the backs of notes; his greediness for wild strawberries, the little pungent Alpine ones; his childish delight in acrobats and jugglers; his way of always calling me you–dear you, every letter began–I never told you a word of all that, did I? Do you suppose I could have helped telling you, if he had loved me? These little things would have been mine, then, a part of my life–of our life–they would have slipped out in spite of me (it’s only your unhappy woman who is always reticent and dignified). But there never was any “our life;” it was always “our lives” to the end….

If you knew what a relief it is to tell some one at last, you would bear with me, you would let me hurt you! I shall never be quite so lonely again, now that some one knows.

Let me begin at the beginning. When I first met Vincent Rendle I was not twenty-five. That was twenty years ago. From that time until his death, five years ago, we were fast friends. He gave me fifteen years, perhaps the best fifteen years, of his life. The world, as you know, thinks that his greatest poems were written during those years; I am supposed to have “inspired” them, and in a sense I did. From the first, the intellectual sympathy between us was almost complete; my mind must have been to him (I fancy) like some perfectly tuned instrument on which he was never tired of playing. Some one told me of his once saying of me that I “always understood;” it is the only praise I ever heard of his giving me. I don’t even know if he thought me pretty, though I hardly think my appearance could have been disagreeable to him, for he hated to be with ugly people. At all events he fell into the way of spending more and more of his time with me. He liked our house; our ways suited him. He was nervous, irritable; people bored him and yet he disliked solitude. He took sanctuary with us. When we travelled he went with us; in the winter he took rooms near us in Rome. In England or on the continent he was always with us for a good part of the year. In small ways I was able to help him in his work; he grew dependent on me. When we were apart he wrote to me continually–he liked to have me share in all he was doing or thinking; he was impatient for my criticism of every new book that interested him; I was a part of his intellectual life. The pity of it was that I wanted to be something more. I was a young woman and I was in love with him–not because he was Vincent Rendle, but just because he was himself!