Frowning slightly, she peered hard at the crabbed writing. Frowning still more, she peered still harder.

At last the fatal words conveyed their message to her.

“My beloved darling Amy.”

It was the draft of a love letter.

Aghast, the stricken chimp reeled back, one hand pressed to her brow. Her dream world lay in ruins about her feet, and, with the deathly faintness which now spread over her, it slowly began to revolve around, evoking a sensation not unlike (yet how unlike!) that procurable on the joy wheel at the fun fairs and luna parks of the carnal capitals of Europe.

“Good Heavens!” she tried to say. “What deceit! What treachery! God! What a fool! What a blind, trusting fool I’ve been!”

And she crushed the letter and dashed it to the ground (as if that could prevent it clinging to her heart like a flypaper!), and in one leap from where she stood she had sprung out and over the veranda, straight into the branches of a palm below, the near end of one of which she caught, which bore her on an inverse arc to the next tree, and so, like a small boat swinging out on the billows of an hurricane, dizzily on into the jungle.

Lovers’ Lane is said by some to be a winding lane, but the path of despised love is as straight as a Roman road. At the moment of disillusion, a red-hot coal smolders where the heart has been, and the victim is impelled forward, heedless of obstacles, bearing with him, like a cow with a thorn under its tail, the very gall he runs so madly to escape. When poetry has fully civilized us, and brought us accidentally into that heaven where the true and the chosen vision are one, and pain and pleasure are no longer divided arbitrarily by superstition, as good and evil once were, we shall find, in this long urgent avidity for relief, a pleasure higher than that now associated with successful love, in that of all appetites, this lasts longest, and endows us with an intenser life, or more reality, the while we attempt to satisfy it.

But Emily’s torment was not shot, as it were, by this weft of superior consciousness; it was pure agony, white-hot, that she experienced as she described a beeline of many miles, which ended not because the hellspark in her heart was quenched, but because it had burnt out, temporarily, all the fuel which her cindered nerves had contained. These, like the filaments in a worn-out electric light bulb, could glow no more, so that the spark ceased to act as a motor, though it burned hot as ever, numbly isolated in her bosom, as she sank fordone beneath a mighty tree. From whose branches, some hours later in the night, peered down the dark and eager face of Henry, who had witnessed her rout, and followed, with lesser speed, in hope of advantaging his unrequited desires.

From an ashy sleep, the chimp awoke to see him drop like a vulture, hitting his mark, yet staggering where he landed.

How repellent they seem to us, when the bright Eden where dwells our loved one casts us forth, and we must return to them, those other ordinary people, acquaintance and kin, whose sottish good humor and tasteless tragedy seem drawn by some Dutch realist, after the crisp exaltation of the Hellenic illusion we have lost! Shall we bow our spirits into profane forgetfulness, and turn in with them, pouring their tallowy kindness into our wounds, bemusing sorrow in the treacly vintage of their mirth and their passions?

I, in short, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant

of our glorious gains,

Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast

with lower pains!

This was what Emily thought, as her persistent admirer shambled towards her, holding out both his hands, in clownish imitation of the truly biped life of which she had tasted. Yet — he loved her. To love, and to be loved; these, the hemispheres of happiness, how rarely they coincide! Would it not be better, she thought, better for all concerned, to let them follow one upon the other, as some take whiskey and then water, and to complete her experience lopsidedly thus, since it was fated never to be a perfect whole?

He loved her. And let happiness curl its cruel lip as it may, those who have loved in vain will know, only too well, that when love has consumed mind, tastes, standards, character itself, till the victim has become only a void in which that desire functions abstractly, then the elements of choice are gone also, and whose hunger has been raised by one particular dish in all the world, will, if he starves long enough, be satisfied with any. “And that,” thought the poor chimp, “without forgetting the least aspect of the truly beloved object, but rather trying, in the final despair of constancy, to inform the husks to which one turns with something of its image, as the families of wild Irish do, who cram their bellies with earthy spuds and fix their eyes on a herring slung out of reach above the table.

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”

But, as the serpentine quotation writhed in the blasted Eden of her mind, she remembered that the poem had a Latin title, and, whether it was a womanly suspicion of words she could not understand, or whether it was wisdom of that deep kind which circumambulates the guileless, she had a profound distrust of all poems with Latin titles, and this straw, wedging across the gutter, stayed, not her drowning, but the torrent in which she was submerged. She raised her eyes, and gazed indecisively, inquiringly, not untenderly, on the supplicating visage of Henry, who had halted, as halts a tomcat, some feet from where she was crouching. Something in his tortured eyes, something that might have been a spark of her own misery, gave her further pause.

Was it fair to him?

This is a question which takes so long in answering, generally, that the majority of her sex take their conscience’s sullen dumbness for assent, but Emily was of different fiber.

Of his misery, wanting her, she could not doubt, for, save for her pestered impulsiveness in the manner of the banana, she was incapable of dismissing lightly any sincere feeling on the part of another, however disproportionate it seemed to its cause. Poor Henry! At that moment it seemed that the only thing left for her to do was to make him happy. Yet how?

For not all the craving of her torn and aching heart for something to hold close and snuggle up to could betray her into the sophistry that she would bestow happiness in bestowing an affection which, like a caged lion, must ceaselessly pace up and down, or sit staring into nothingness, heedless and unresponsive in its obvious longing for its ever-distant ever-present home. That would be worse than sending him away. Was there no solution?

There was. Behind the suppliant swain the tall grasses waved, were parting. Looking over his head she caught a glimpse of a sinewy spotted back, cautiously drawing nearer.

Perhaps it was all for the best. Holding her breath, she held also Henry’s attention with her eyes. Time slowed up, as when a clock gaspingly gathers up its powers to strike.

Then, all simultaneously, in one flash, in one scream, in one leap, the leopard was upon poor Henry, and Emily, as if she had been sitting on the other end of a seesaw, was shooting towards and clinging to the bough above her, and ere the long scream had, like a withering fountain, sunk to a gurgle, she was swinging madly on, as if to leave love and death and warm life forever behind her.

Let her go as far, though, and as fast as she may, her blind and mind-shut rush is foredoomed to a limit, as that of a rocket is, which, urged by a similar fire, must, unless it flies clear of the earth’s field of gravitation, fall back in exhausted fragments, with a plump exactly proportionate to the momentum of its breakaway.

Mr. Fatigay, we know, was all the world to Emily, and a world of which the gravitational attraction was so far-reaching that there was no practical possibility of her ever flying clear of it. It was hopeless for her to try to escape from jealousy by ‘going native’, for the moment inevitably arrived when, like the dog in Tennyson, she rose, twofooted at the limit of her chain, roaring to make a third.

This occurred some days later, when she had traveled exactly a thousand miles, by the way, and, running out along a broad bough, she stopped as suddenly as if she had been pierced by an arrow.

She stood, staring into vacancy, seeing, as if it was flashed upon a cinematograph screen before her, a vision of herself and Mr. Fatigay walking slowly home from the schoolhouse, through the long and treacly beams of the evening sun. It’s very strange, how at the moment that one’s blind flight stops, it is generally no really important aspect of the dear one that abruptly arrests us, opening up like a firework in the blank behind the fixed neuralgic businesslike mask we have put on, but some detail of the background, seeming to have slipped past the censor by virtue of its obvious unimportance, that brings home to us, and us home, to the dearness we have lost.

Emily visualized Mr. Fatigay’s mildly sloping shoulders just before her, and her closed heart opened in such a quick ecstasy that it seemed that if she could only see just that much just once in reality, it would be enough. We do not ask at such moments, “Enough for what?”

But, turning with the shaking eagerness of the long-starved, we run helter-skelter back again, and, as we stumble blubbering into the presence we have hungered for, we scarcely notice at first if it is warm or cold, any more than a famished man does when his porridge is put before him.

So Emily stood motionless, for a moment or an hour, staring before her, with one hand on her heart, which ached now like a cramped limb to which the blood returns, and then she made one slow step back, and then another, and a few doubtful paces, till suddenly she broke into a run and soon was swinging back along the airy forest road as quickly as she had come. And, in effect, as blindly, for the thawed stream in eager spate is as far from clear as it was when set blackly in the crudest frost.

What thoughts she had, as she toiled in sobbing haste up the long tangled slopes; or stared from their crests as if, ere she had gone a tenth of the way, she hoped to see her goal; or plunged madly down from treetop to treetop on their farther sides, were hardly thoughts, but rather the beams and timbers of the dam she had built up against emotion, and these, now that the torrent had broken through, reversed their purpose, and, if anything, hurried her faster down the swirling race. She longed to feel again, to know, the very wound against which she had clenched her mind; it was, even in the very killing of her, life, and, compared with it, all that she could fly to was desert and dead beyond bearing.