any rate I shall always believe that part of his conversation was in an
indirect way a confidence. He was still unstrung by the unexpected
incident which had caused both his hasty departure and the sudden
metamorphosis in what he himself, if he had been writing, would have
called his "intimate heaven." The story he told me was "per sfogarsi," as
Bayle loved to say; his idea was that I would not discover the real hero.
I shall always believe that it was his own story under another name, and I
love to believe it because it was so exactly his way of looking at things.
It was apropos of the supposed subject of my novel--oh, irony!--apropos of
the real subject of my interview that he began.

"I have been thinking about our conversation and about your book, and I am
afraid that I expressed myself badly yesterday. When I said that one may
love and be loved at any age I ought to have added that sometimes this
love comes too late. It comes when one no longer has the right to prove to
the loved one how much she is loved, except by love's sacrifice. I should
like to share with you a human document, as they say to-day, which is in
itself a drama with a dénouement. But I must ask you not to use it, for
the secret is not my own." With the assurance of my discretion he went on:
"I had a friend, a companion of my own age, who, when he was twenty, had
loved a young girl. He was poor, she was rich. Her family separated them.
The girl married some one else and almost immediately afterward she died.
My friend lived. Some day you will know for yourself that it is almost as
true to say that one recovers from all things as that there is nothing
which does not leave its scar. I had been the confidant of his serious
passion, and I became the confidant of the various affairs that followed
that first ineffaceable disappointment. He felt, he inspired, other loves.
He tasted other joys. He endured other sorrows, and yet when we were alone
and when we touched upon those confidences that come from the heart's
depths, the girl who was the ideal of his twentieth year reappeared in his