He turned to leave the room, but she threw herself upon him and clung to him.

“You are right—­quite right, darling,” her voice half-choked with terror and excitement; “but forgive me—­forgive me for the sake of my love to you.  That story belongs to the past, and the past is buried—­buried forever.  I cannot believe myself that it is not all a hideous dream—­that it should be really true!  It was not I—­it was another woman, a stranger whom I do not know—­with whom I have nothing in common.  I was not alive then—­I have only lived since you were mine.  Oh, why did you come so late?” And her wild, passionate words sank into heartrending sobs.

He could not but be sorry for her.  Was it wise, was it fitting to rake up the past?  Had he any right to call her to account for faults which were not committed against him?  She was good and pure now.  She had not broken faith with him—­not even in her thoughts—­for she had no eyes for anybody in the world but him!  He held out his hand to her.

“I will forget what I heard to-day,” he said, “and do not let us ever speak again of what has been.”

He was quite sincere in saying this, for he really wished to forget.  But our memory is not subject to our will.  Do what he would, he could not banish the consumptive poet from his mind, nor the diplomat with the silly, handsome face, and other figures more shadowy than these two, but none the less annoying.  He learned to know that most torturing form of jealousy—­the jealousy of the past--against which it is hopeless to struggle, which will not be dispelled, and which, in its unalterable steadfastness, mocks at the despair of the heart that is forever searching after new grounds for torment, and yet cries aloud when it finds what it sought.  His imagination wandered perpetually from the lovely pastel in the yellow salon to the new ebony bed, with its inlaid ivory scenes in the bedroom, and saw or guessed things between these two points that made him shudder.

Thus, New Year’s night found him in a very gloomy frame of mind, and the letter he wrote to Schrotter expressed a still deeper dejection than that of the year before.  Since recounting the conversation about the donkey in Ault, he had never again mentioned Pilar to his friend, nor betrayed by a single word the circumstances in which he had lived since the middle of August.  Such disclosures would have necessitated a moral effort on his part, for which even his friendship for Schrotter could not supply him with sufficient force.  He knew that Schrotter’s views on morality were neither narrow nor pharisaical, that to him virtue did not consist in the outward observance of social rules, but in self-forgetful, brotherly love and a strict adherence to duty.  It would have afforded him unspeakable relief to have been able to pour out his heart to his friend, to give him an insight into his turbid love-story and the conflict in his soul.  But a sense of shame—­the outcome, no doubt, of his own disgust at the unsavory accessories of his love—­had withheld him from making these confidences.  He made none now, complained only in a general way of the emptiness of his life, to which neither desire nor hope bound him any more; especially that he had no future, and looked forward to each new day with horror and shrinking.