Your letter has moved me deeply, very deeply. I would have prevented its being written if I could. It is the greatest tribute--save one--that has ever come to me; and yet I wish I had not read it. I'm not free to make you any promise. I'm not free to correspond with you any more--now. I've been trying to find a way to tell you so indirectly, but your letter makes it necessary for me to do so directly.
The rest of the letter was an attempt to soften the blow, but it fell upon him very hard.
The possibility which he had always feared had become a fact, the hope which he had kept in the obscure processes of his thought and which had filled a vital place in his action, dropped out and left him purposeless. This hope of somehow, someway having her near to him had been the mainspring of his action and it could not be withdrawn without leaving him disabled.
He returned to the letter again, and again studying each word, each mark. He saw in it her acceptance of some other--probably Birdsell.
Then he saw that she had withdrawn the privilege--the blessed privilege--of writing to her. She was determined to go out of his life completely. At times as he imagined this strongly, his throat swelled till he could hardly breathe. He would have cried if nature had not denied him that relief.
He saw how baseless his hope had been, and he exonerated her from all blame. She had been kind and helpful till he spoiled it all by a fool's presumption. He had always exaggerated her social position and her attainments, but in the depths of his self-abasement and despair every kindness she had done him and every letter she had written took on a new significance. On every one he saw her warnings. Every meeting he had ever had with her he now went over and over with the strange pleasure one takes in bruising an aching limb.
She had never been other than reserved, impersonal in his presence. She had shown him again and again that her intimate life was not for him to know. He remembered now the peculiar look of perfect understanding which flashed between Birdsell and Ida, which troubled him at the time, but which his cursed egotism had brushed away as of no significance.
His speech lay there on the table, it was waste paper now. He had no one left to address it to. His utter loneliness came back to him. His mind went back over the line of his life till it came again into the little opening in the Wisconsin woods where the pines wept or snarled ceaselessly--till his mother died in the moan and the snarl and shadow of them. His heart went out to her as never before since Ida came into his life.