Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/188

176 heart's blood. After the curiosity awoke, the heart's blood was only highly-coloured water.

"Look here. I can't stand it any longer. I'm a brute and I know it, and I know you'll think so. The fact is I've fallen in love with your Harry, and I simply can't bear it seeing her every day almost and knowing she's yours and not mine" (there the analytic demon pricked up its ears and the scratching of the pen ceased). "I have fought against this," the letter went on after a long pause. "You don't know how I've fought, but it's stronger than I am. I love her—impossibly, unbearably—the only right and honourable thing to do is to go away, and I'm going. My only hope is that she'll never know. "Your old friend."

As he scrawled the signatory hieroglyphic, his only hope was that she would know it, and that the knowledge would leaven, with tenderly pitying thoughts of him, the heroic figure, her happiness with Tom, the commonplace.

He addressed and stamped the envelope; but he did not close it.

"I might want to put in another word or