YOU are my friend. Therefore I am sure of your patience. My dearest, yield it to me now, of all times! This is a confession and prayer.

True, I might dissemble still. Chance lends the ready garment.

But I am resolved I will have no more lies. I will speak the truth, though I lose you. I never knew much good to come of lies.

Dear, if you love me much, this will pain you bitterly. I should be glad to die now, if so I rightly might, that you might think of me always as you do now, and she might never know, or be wounded in her faith and pride.

For me has been destined the doing of that wrong I look upon as the deadliest of all. Treachery is the crime, and the crime is mine.

Let me tell you again, you tender woman, you dearest and noblest in the world, how I love you. I think of you constantly, I yearn for your sweet companionship. You are my dear ideal,—you are to me all peacefulness and worth and wisdom and womanly greatness and incomparable grace. You are the pure air to me.

Dear, it is because my love for you is the best that is in me that I am at such pains to make my confession absolute. My heart grows imperious at thought of you, and leaps for the highest course, though that bids for the supernal sacrifice of losing you—you, so sweetly gained! For you I should be happy to die now, heart in hand.

It would be sweet, I think, to die now, to leave this black dilemma, to vanish utterly. And yet, while you live, all splendor and all graces are here!

... Dear Anne, there is another woman I have been making love to—how I loathe to write the name—Doris Ewing, who loves me as I love you, and to whom I grew tender just in hopelessness of you.

So far away in the North you were, so like the figment of a fond impossible ideal, and she was here beside me, dark-eyed and sweet. I loved her. So often I said it—so sweetly she believed, and the habit grew. “I love you,” I said, even when I knew that love was just like. For often she was but as a small craft on the heaving sea of my passion, the sea that ran to its flood-tide for you!

I told her repeatedly I loved her—and lied. Was it any the less a lie that the spirit of romance was strong within me, and my heart-hunger made me mad? I loved her in this fashion, say, because she was loving, and my heart was full of love.

It did not come to me forcibly at the time that I was lying. I had come into the habit of her, and the words did not stick in my throat, as lies usually do. I did not despise myself. My duplicity I learned to contemplate with equanimity and to forget, and so I lied ardently and successfully. What a bad success it was!

For Doris loved me dearly, and cried over me a bit, now and then, I suspect, and was beautiful and happy. I wondered, sometimes (forgetting the reason that lay in my larger desire—you!), why I did not really love her.

Such is my story, as well as I understand it.

She is very sweet, and I am very fond of her. I seek to extenuate nothing; I write the crude facts as I know them. She has black hair and eyes; she is very white and slender, with nestling ways. She is not very learned or rich, but patrician and proud; all agree that she is beautiful. She is debonair and sweet, and when I think of you she is nothing to me—nothing!

But I tried to love her just in love’s despite; and she was happy in the main, and I was half-resigned. I stifle when I think of that.

How pitiful it all was!

Often she leaned, touched my shoulder, and spoke with downcast eyes:—

“Do you really love me?”

“Very tenderly.”

“Passionately?”

“Passionately.”

“With all your heart?”

“With all my heart.”

“Forever?”

“Forever.”

She mistrusted me no more than the day mistrusts the sun.

And one night I sat late in my room, thinking. It was cold; the wild wind arose, hissing in the stark trees. Out in the cold sky the stars shone white and multitudinous. There came to me a wanton mood; I floated with it, pensive and relaxed. I had no wish to change it, but desired only to sit peacefully through the midnight until sleep should come, to lightly conjecture and mildly reflect, to clasp my knees by the fire and await the fortunes of the hour. Life had grown trivial.

And by degrees the thoughts of you came intensely and possessed me. That was the night I wrote you that mad long letter of adoration and despair.

Ah, you were to me impossible! I had been half-resigned. But that night passion reigned. It was my dearest tribute just to tell you of the love I had for you. If it was madness, it was a sweet madness.

I thought when your letter would come I would sit for a while with it in my hand, and dream the sweet, the terrible, the improbable,—before I opened it to read your kind wording (I knew it would be kind) of what my despair taught me to expect.

Then the wires shot stupefying joy.

“Everything! Why did you wait so long? Come to me now—at once! I give you all!”

I had the message there at the street. I gazed blankly. Then with realization came tumultuous sweetness that was pain. Doris, across the way, stopped singing.

“Good news, Roger?”

“The best, and the worst!”

“Oh! Tell me about it, when I come.”

...Do your eyebrows slope, and your lips upcurl?

I have written it all out. When she comes (she is coming soon) I shall tell her all, as I have told you. This is to be the blackest hour of my life. I have made up my mind to tell her the truth. It is her right. But my heart has so often failed me. If this is tenderness, why what a false tenderness it is!

I have no more hopes of you now than I had when I wrote you. But I belong to you, and will always belong to you, just for your once loving, even though you despise me, now and forever.

I shall tell her frankly, extenuating nothing. For I will have no more lies. On that I am resolved.

Anne, I do not truly live without you, and I crave the intensest living. I think of you always as I saw you first—tall and fair, with the gold across your temples, and the museful, wistful mouth with its serious thinking silences and then its soft rapid speech, and the eyes, the blue eyes, that had for me such exquisite language. You are repose—Heaven! And I am in a hell of my own making, and, dearest, I could not help it! Ah, I am pleading! I did not mean to plead.

Did you have a dream of me, as noble, say? Here am I, who love life because of you, who love you more than that life or my hope of heaven. But what to you is such a love?

She is coming soon, and I shall tell her. I say I shall have no more deception. I am yours—yours! I dare not write the prayer that is in my heart. I cannot say farewell. Remember, when you despise me worst, I am yours!