He was afraid that she
would read his revulsion in his eyes, would suspect how time and his very
constancy had given her the one rival with whom she could never compete;
the memory of her old self, of her gracious girlhood, which was dead. Might
not she too, actually, welcome a reprieve; however readily she would have
submitted out of honour or lassitude, to a marriage which could only be a
parody of what might have been?
At Lisbon, I hoped that he had settled these questions, had grown
reasonable and sane, for he wrote a long letter to her which was
subsequently a matter of much curiosity to me; and he wore, for a day or
two afterwards, an air almost of assurance which deceived me. I wondered
what he had put in that epistle, how far he had explained himself,
justified his curious attitude. Or was it simply a _resume_, a conclusion
to those many letters which he had written at Agnas Blancas, the last one
which he would ever address to the little girl of the earlier photograph?
Later, I would have given much to decide this, but she herself, the woman
who read it, maintained unbroken silence. In return, I kept a secret from
her, my private interpretation of the accident of his death.
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