Page:Herbert Jenkins - The Rain Girl.djvu/257

 bit the end of the pen. He felt like a man with an impediment in his speech, who all his life had been striving to say "good-bye"; but had never been able to get beyond the preliminary "gug-gug."

He added a comma after "Girl," then he made a slight alteration in the tail of the "R"; finally he got going.

For five minutes he wrote slowly and laboriously, then picking up the letter he read it deliberately, only to throw it down in disgust. It was difficult to strike the medium between the flippant and the sentimental. He had a horror of appearing like the heroine of a melodrama bent on secretly leaving home, who for five minutes stands in a draughty doorway bidding good-bye to the furniture. No, there must be no self-pity in anything he wrote to Lola.

After all, what did it matter how he expressed himself? All that was necessary was to tell her that he was going away, and that in as few words as possible. Once more he selected a sheet of note-paper, this time with an air of grim determination, and proceeded to write slowly and without hesitation:—

With great deliberation he reached for an envelope, folded and inserted the note, stuck down