This shows me what your
feelings must have been at the time, at any rate, and remember a
thick manuscript is not burnt in a minute. How long must it have
taken you to destroy those sheets upon sheets of paper in which you
knew another man's very heart, and blood, and nerve had been
infused? All that time you must have been animated with the sheer
lust of cruelly and brutally ill-using and injuring me, and in
return I"--
I shut and locked my lips upon the words that rose.
To abuse or curse another is almost as degrading to oneself as to
strike him.
We had come up to the end of the alley now, and we paused by the
blank brick wall. There was a lamp projecting from it which threw
some light upon us both, and, as his figure came distinctly before
my eyes, I felt one intolerable desire to leap upon him--this
miserable creature who had destroyed my work--fling him to the
ground, and grind his face and head to a shapeless mass in this
slimy gutter that flowed at our feet.
Could he have faintly realised what my feelings were, coward as he
was, he would never have come up this empty alley with me.
"Well, Victor, I am leaving Paris to-night; but I felt I could not
go without telling you how infinitely I regret it all. If you can
never be my friend again, you can forgive me. Let me hear you say
that you do before I go.
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