i lay at the melch see inn that night, and rose betimes and started down that wild grey gorge in the early morning light. i walked to sachseln, caught an early train to lucerne and went on in the afternoon to como. and there i stayed in the sunshine taking a boat and rowing alone far up the lake and lying in it, thinking of love and friendship and the accidents and significance of my life, and for the most part not thinking at all but feeling, feeling the glow of our meeting and the finality of our separation, as one feels the clear glow of a sunset when the wind rises and the cold night draws near. everything was pervaded by the sense of her. just over those mountains, i thought, is mary. i was alone in my boat, but her presence filled the sky. it seemed to me that at any moment i could go to her. and the last vestige of any cloud between us for anything we had done or failed to do in these crises of distress and separation, had vanished and gone altogether.

in the afternoon i wrote to rachel. i had not written to her for three days, and even now i told her nothing of my meeting with mary. i had not written partly because i could not decide whether i should tell her of that or not; in the end i tried to hide it from her. it seemed a little thing in regard to her, a thing that could not hurt her, a thing as detached from her life and as inconsecutive as a dream in my head.

three days later i reached milan, a day before the formal opening of the peace congress. but i found a telegram had come that morning to the poste restante to banish all thought of my pacific mission from my mind. it came from paris and its blue ribbon of text ran:

"come back at once to london. justin has been told of our meeting and is resolved upon divorce. will do all in my power to explain and avert but feel you should know at once."

there are some things so monstrously destructive to all we hold dear that for a time it is impossible to believe them. i remember now that as i read that amazing communication through—at the first reading it was a little difficult to understand because the italian operator had guessed at one or two of the words, no real sense of its meaning came to me. that followed sluggishly. i felt as one might feel when one opens some offensive anonymous letter or hears some preposterous threat.

"what nonsense!" i said, faint-heartedly. i stood for a time at my bedroom window trying to shake this fact altogether off my mind. but it stayed, and became more and more real. suddenly with a start i perceived it was real. i had to do things forthwith.

i rang the bell and asked for an orario. "i shan't want these rooms. i have to go back to england," i said. "yes,—i have had bad news." ...