One evening, a few days afterwards, at her home we were going over some new songs and compositions when she asked me, as she often did, to play the Thirteenth Nocturne.  When I began, she drew a chair near to my right and sat leaning with her elbow on the end of the piano, her chin resting on her hand, and her eyes reflecting the emotions which the music awoke in her.  An impulse which I could not control rushed over me, a wave of exultation, the music under my fingers sank almost to a whisper, and calling her for the first time by her Christian name, but without daring to look at her, I said:  “I love you, I love you, I love you.”  My fingers were trembling so that I ceased playing.  I felt her hand creep to mine, and when I looked at her, her eyes were glistening with tears.  I understood, and could scarcely resist the longing to take her in my arms; but I remembered, remembered that which has been the sacrificial altar of so much happiness—­Duty; and bending over her hand in mine, I said:  “Yes, I love you; but there is something more, too, that I must tell you.”  Then I told her, in what words I do not know, the truth.  I felt her hand grow cold, and when I looked up, she was gazing at me with a wild, fixed stare as though I was some object she had never seen.  Under the strange light in her eyes I felt that I was growing black and thick-featured and crimp-haired.  She appeared not to have comprehended what I had said.  Her lips trembled and she attempted to say something to me, but the words stuck in her throat.  Then, dropping her head on the piano, she began to weep with great sobs that shook her frail body.  I tried to console her, and blurted out incoherent words of love, but this seemed only to increase her distress, and when I left her, she was still weeping.

When I got into the street, I felt very much as I did the night after meeting my father and sister at the opera in Paris, even a similar desperate inclination to get drunk; but my self-control was stronger.  This was the only time in my life that I ever felt absolute regret at being colored, that I cursed the drops of African blood in my veins and wished that I were really white.  When I reached my rooms, I sat and smoked several cigars while I tried to think out the significance of what had occurred.  I reviewed the whole history of our acquaintance, recalled each smile she had given me, each word she had said to me that nourished my hope.  I went over the scene we had just gone through, trying to draw from it what was in my favor and what was against me.  I was rewarded by feeling confident that she loved me, but I could not estimate what was the effect upon her of my confession.  At last, nervous and unhappy, I wrote her a letter, which I dropped into the mail-box before going to bed, in which I said: