I have destroyed the papers."
"Destroyed them?" I faltered.
"Yes; what was I to keep them for? I burned them last night,
one by one, in the kitchen."
"One by one?" I repeated, mechanically.
"It took a long time--there were so many." The room seemed to go round me
as she said this, and a real darkness for a moment descended upon my eyes.
When it passed Miss Tita was there still, but the transfiguration
was over and she had changed back to a plain, dingy, elderly person.
It was in this character she spoke as she said, "I can't stay with you longer,
I can't;" and it was in this character that she turned her back upon me,
as I had turned mine upon her twenty-four hours before, and moved to
the door of her room. Here she did what I had not done when I quitted her--
she paused long enough to give me one look. I have never forgotten it
and I sometimes still suffer from it, though it was not resentful.
No, there was no resentment, nothing hard or vindictive in poor Miss Tita;
for when, later, I sent her in exchange for the portrait of Jeffrey Aspern
a larger sum of money than I had hoped to be able to gather for her,
writing to her that I had sold the picture, she kept it with thanks;
she never sent it back. I wrote to her that I had sold the picture,
but I admitted to Mrs. Prest, at the time (I met her in London,
in the autumn), that it hangs above my writing table. When I look at it
my chagrin at the loss of the letters becomes almost intolerable.
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