Some weeks later he wrote: 

“I wander about this place a good deal like a ghost in its old haunts.  Everything here is so temporary, so changing—­much more so than in New York—­that one’s footprints are very quickly washed away.  Outside the office almost no one remembers me.  It is curious to think that I was once so happy here—­and so hopeful.  There was always a kind of hell in my heart, but I kept it banked down, as we do the earth’s internal fires, beneath a tolerably solid crust.  Yesterday, finding myself at the Hipodromo, I stood for a while on the spot where I first saw Evie.  It used to seem to me a bit of enchanted ground, but I feel now as if I ought to erect a gravestone there.  Poor little Evie!  How right you were about it all.  It was madness on my part to think she could ever climb up my Calvary.  My excuse is that I didn’t imagine it was going to be so steep.  I even hoped she would never see that there was a Calvary at all.  Her notes are still pitifully ignorant of the real state of things.

“And speaking of gravestones, I went out the other day to the Recoleta Cemetery, and looked at the grave of my poor old friend, Monsieur Durand.  Everything neat, and in good order.  It gives me a peculiar satisfaction to see that the decorum he loved reigns where he ‘sleeps.’  I never knew his secret—­except that rumor put him down for an unfrocked priest.

“I doubt if I shall get away from here till the beginning of October; but when I do, everything will be in trim for what I sometimes think of as my resurrection.”

* * * * *

These letters, and others like them, Miriam shared conscientiously with Conquest.  It was part of the loyalty she had vowed to him in her heart that she should keep nothing from him, except what was sanctified and sealed forever, as her own private history.  In the impulse to give her life as a ransom for Norrie Ford’s she was eager to do it without reserves, or repinings, or backward looks—­without even a wish that it had been possible to make any other use of it.  If she was not entirely successful in the last feat, she was fairly equal to the rest, so that in allowing himself to be misled Conquest could scarcely be charged with fatuity.  With his combined advantages, personal and otherwise, it was not astonishing that a woman should be in love with him; and if that woman proved to be Miriam Strange, one could only say that the unexpected had happened, as it often does.  If, in view of all the circumstances, he dressed better than ever, and gave his little dinners more frequently, while happiness toned down the sharpness of his handsome profile to a softer line, he had little in common with Malvolio.