‘My love was not returned.’

‘Did you ask her?’

‘No.  It was needless.  It went without saying.’

‘You never can tell.  You ought to have asked her.’

’It was on the tip of my tongue, of course, to do so a hundred times.  My life was passed in torturing myself with the question whether I had any chance, in hoping and fearing.  But as often as I found myself alone with her I knew it was hopeless.  Her manner to me—­it was one of frank friendliness.  There was no mistaking it.  She never thought of loving me.’

’You were wrong not to ask her.  One never can be sure.  Oh, why didn’t you ask her?’ His old friend spoke with great feeling.

He looked at her, surprised and eager.  ’Do you really think she might have cared for me?’

‘Oh, you ought to have told her:  you ought to have asked her,’ she repeated.

‘Well—­now you know why I went away.’

‘Yes.’

’When I heard of her—­her—­death’—­he could not bring himself to say her suicide—­’there was nothing else for me to do.  It was so hideous, so unutterable.  To go on with my old life, in the old place, among the old people, was quite impossible.  I wanted to follow her, to do what she had done.  The only alternative was to fly as far from England, as far from myself, as I could.’

‘Sometimes,’ Mrs. Kempton confessed by-and-bye, ’sometimes I wondered whether, possibly, your disappearance could have had any such connection with Mary’s death—­it followed it so immediately.  I wondered sometimes whether, perhaps, you had cared for her.  But I couldn’t believe it—­it was only because the two things happened one upon the other.  Oh, why didn’t you tell her?  It is dreadful, dreadful!’

IV.

When he had left her, she sat still for a little while before the fire.

’Life is a chance to make mistakes—­a chance to make mistakes.  Life is a chance to make mistakes.’

It was a phrase she had met in a book she was reading the other day:  then she had smiled at it; now it rang in her ears like the voice of a mocking demon.

‘Yes, a chance to make mistakes,’ she said, half aloud.

She rose and went to her desk, unlocked a drawer, turned over its contents, and took out a letter—­an old letter, for the paper was yellow and the ink was faded.  She came back to the fireside, and unfolded the letter and read it.  It covered six pages of note-paper, in a small feminine hand.  It was a letter Mary Isona had written to her, Margaret Kempton, the night before she died, more than thirty years ago.  The writer recounted the many harsh circumstances of her life; but they would all have been bearable, she said, save for one great and terrible secret.  She had fallen in love with a man who was scarcely conscious of her existence; she, a little obscure Italian music teacher, had fallen in love with Theodore Vellan.