“No,” said I, “leave it here.”

From the furrier’s label, I saw that the box contained some furs I had ordered for Carlotta a fortnight ago—­she shivered so, poor child, in this wintry climate.

“But, Monsieur,” began Antoinette, “the poor angel—­”

“May want it in heaven,” said I.

The good woman stared.

“We’ll be like the ancient Egyptians, Antoinette,” I explained, “who placed food and wine and raiment and costly offerings in the tombs of the departed, so that their shades could come and enjoy them for all eternity.  We’ll have to make believe, Antoinette, that this is a tomb, for one can’t rear a pyramid in London, though it is a desert sufficiently vast; and the little second floor room is the inner sanctuary where the body lies in silence embalmed with sweet spices and swathed in endless bands of linen.”

“But Mademoiselle is not dead?” cried Antoinette, with a shiver.  “How can Monsieur talk of such things?  It makes me fear, the way Monsieur speaks.”

“It makes me fear, too, Antoinette,” said I, gravely.

When she had gone I took the box of furs upstairs and laid it unopened on Carlotta’s bed and came away, relocking the door behind me.

November 9th.

I have formed a great resolution.  I have devoted the week to the envisagement of things, and while I lay awake last night the solution came to me as something final and irrevocable.  Mistrusting the counsels of the night, when the brain is unduly excited by nervous insomnia, I have applied the test of a day’s cold reason.

I have broken a woman’s heart.  I have spurned the passionate love of a woman who has been near and dear to me; a woman of great nature; a woman of subtle brain who has been my chosen companion, my equal partner in any intellectual path I chose to tread; a sensitive lady, with all the graciousness of soul that term conveys.  Heaven knows what a woman can see in me to love.  I look in the glass at my bony, hawk-like face, on which the stamp of futility seems eternally set, and I am seized with a prodigious wonder; but the fact remains that to me unlovely and unworthy has been given that thing without price, a woman’s love.  I remember Pasquale laughing merrily at this valuation.  He said the love of women was as cheap as dirt, and the only use for it was to make mud pies.  The damned cynical villain!  “Always reflect,” said he, on another occasion, “that although a man may be as ugly as sin, the probability is that he is just as pleasant.  Beauties will find hitherto unsuspected amenities in Beasts till the end of time.”  But I am such a poor and sorry Beast, without the chance of a transformation; a commonplace Beast, dull and didactic; a besotted, purblind, despicable Beast!  Yet Judith loved me.  Instead of thanking on my knees the high gods for the boon conferred, I rejected it, and went mad for craving of the infinitely lesser glory of Carlotta’s baby lips and gold-bronze hair.  I have broken Judith’s heart.  I will expiate the crime I have committed.