At last I read these lines: 

“I am terribly, unutterably grieved, my own dearest one, to hear how much you have suffered, but my return to you now would not undo that, and only give you the pain in addition that I went away to avoid for you.

“Go, dearest, go out to ’Frisco, and let the thought of me lie in your subconsciousness for a year, a little chrysalis of future happiness.  Do not think of me, do not let your mind dwell on me.  Fill up your life with joy and work.  I have a conviction that we cannot ever really separate in this life.  Therefore I do not fear (as you seemed to do) that anything will be strong enough to keep us apart if we both will to be together.  Only, for a time, let me sleep in your Soul in a chamber where none other can enter, and the year will soon pass for you, though slowly, as a winter night, for me.  Your

    “VIOLA.”

* * * * *

A great numbness seized me as I came to the end.

A year without her.  It seemed like Eternity itself.

I sat for many hours motionless with her letter in my hand.

Then I went out and to a ticket office in Piccadilly, and got a through ticket to ’Frisco.

CHAPTER IX

IN ’FRISCO

During the voyage to New York and the subsequent journey across America to San Francisco I was very wretched.

The mystery of Viola’s disappearance and her flight from me stood before my mind perpetually, worrying and harassing it.  I felt no joyful anticipation of reaching ’Frisco and meeting Suzee, though I recognised in a dull way that some sort of distraction and companionship would be the best thing to stop this incessant pondering on the same subject.  I slept little at night, and in the short intervals of rest such vivid dreams of Viola would come to me, that awakening in the morning brought a fresh anguish of despair and disappointment with it each day.

This sort of thing could not go on, I must let her “lie asleep in my subconsciousness for a year,” as she put it in her letter—­for to forget her was impossible—­or my reason would go down under the strain.

When I arrived in San Francisco, it was one of those strange days when the sea-fog comes in to visit the town.  It rolled in great thick billows down the streets from the sand dunes, obscuring everything, damping everything, filling the air with the salt scent of the open sea.

I went to one of the big hotels, and they gave me a bedroom and sitting-room to myself:  the rooms were adjoining and comfortable, but oh! what a blankness fell upon me as I sat down in one of the chairs and the bell-boy, having deposited a jug of iced water on the table, shut the door.  I had been so much with Viola that it seemed strange to me now, hard to realise that I was alone.  How many rooms such as these, she and I had come into, shared together,