“Jasmine,” he wrote, “this letter, this first real letter of love which I have ever written you, will tell you how great that love is.  It will tell you, too, what it means to me, and what I see before us.  To-day I surrendered to you all of me that would be worth your keeping, if it was so that you might take and keep it.  When I kissed you, I set the seal upon my eternal offering to you.  You have given me success.  It is for that I thank you with all my soul, but it is not for that I love you.  Love flows from other fountains than gratitude.  It rises from the well which has its springs at the beginning of the world, where those beings lived who loved before there were any gods at all, or any faiths, or any truths save the truth of being.

“But it is because what I feel belongs to something in me deeper than I have ever known that, since we parted a few hours ago, I see all in a new light.  You have brought to me what perhaps could only have come as it did—­through fire and cloud and storm.  I did not will it so, indeed, I did not wish it so, as you know; but it came in spite of all.  And I shall speak to you of it as to my own soul.  I want no illusions, no self-deception, no pretense to be added to my debt to you.  With wide-open eyes I want to look at it.  I know that this love of mine for you is my fate, the first and the last passion of my soul.  And to have known it with all its misery,—­for misery there must be; misery, Jasmine, there is—­to have known it, to have felt it, the great overwhelming thing, goes far to compensate for all the loss it so terribly exposes.  It has brought me, too, the fruit of life’s ambition.  With the full revelation of all that I feel for you came that which gives me place in the world, confers on me the right to open doors which otherwise were closed to me.  You have done this for me, but what have I done for you?  One thing at least is forced upon me, which I must do now while I have the sight to see and the mind to understand.

“I cannot go on with things as they are.  I cannot face Rudyard and give myself to hourly deception.  I think that yesterday, a month ago, I could have done so, but not now.  I cannot walk the path which will be paved with things revolting to us both.  My love for you, damnable as it would seem in the world’s eyes, prevents it.  It is not small enough to be sustained or made secure in its furfilment by the devices of intrigue.  And I know that if it is so with me, it must be a thousand times so with you.  Your beauty would fade and pass under the stress and meanness of it; your heart would reproach me even when you smiled; you would learn to hate me even when you were resting upon my hungry heart.  You would learn to loathe the day when you said, Let me help you.  Yet, Jasmine, I know that you are mine; that you were mine long ago, even when you did not know, and were captured by opportunity to do what, with me, you felt you could not do.  You were captured by it; but it has not proved what it promised.  You have not made the best of the power into which you came, and you could not do so, because the spring from which all the enriching waters of married life flow was dry.  Poor Jasmine—­poor illusion of a wild young heart which reached out for the golden city of the mirage!