One of these nights, when I came into the unlighted room, I saw a
letter lying, a white square, in the dusk, upon the table. I
supposed it was from my father, as Lucia never wrote, and I was too
occupied, or indifferent, or rather both, to keep up other
correspondents.
In answer to the first long desperate letter that I had written to
my father after Lucia's visit, in which I told him, without
explaining farther, that an accident had happened to the MS., and
begging him to release me from the arrangement made before I left
England, I had received a derisive note from him, full of ironical
sympathy with my misfortunes, and advising me to settle down to
another year's work, with a good grace and a contented spirit.
My appeals on behalf of Lucia and myself he simply ignored.
I tore the letter into atoms and flung them over the balcony, and
since then my letters to him had been short notes, out of which I
studiously kept my own feelings. There was no one now to whom I
could either speak or write a word of personal matters.
An anchorite in a cave of the desert could not have been more shut
off from that dear communication with his fellows that a man hardly
values till he loses it.
When I had lighted the lamp I sat staring at the loose sheets of the
manuscript lying on the side table, noting painfully how far it was
from completion, and it was only when I lifted it to the middle
table for work that I glanced at the letter again.
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