I asked her yesterday to come back to me. I said that
the house was empty; that the rooms ached for the want of her. I
pleaded so passionately and the eyes before me so melted that I
thought her heart was touched. But in the midst of it all
another visitor came up and the creature uttered a whining plaint
and put out her paw for buns--by which token I felt indeed that
it was Carlotta.
I have accepted the blow silently. As yet I have told no one. I
have made no inquiries. When a man is betrayed by his best
friend and deserted by the woman he loves, time and solitude are
the only comforters. Besides, to whom should I go for comfort?
I have lived too remote from my kind, and my kind heeds me not.
Not a line has reached me from Carlotta. She has gone out of my
life as lightly and as remorselessly as she went out of Hamdi
Effendi's; as she went, for aught she knew, out of that of the
unhappy boy who lured her from Alexandretta. If she heard I was
dead, I wonder whether she would say: "I am so glad!"
Whether the flight was planned between them, or whether Pasquale
waylaid her on her way to the Avenue Road and then and there
proposed that she should accompany him, I do not know.
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