The Mysterious Mr. Miller by William Le Queux

"If your love has ended in tragedy, as mine has done, then we can surely sympathise with each other, Miss Miller," I said, looking into her tearful eyes. "You know well how I have suffered. I believed that Ella really preferred that man to myself, and what you have now told me amazes me. I believed that she was false to me -- and yet you tell me that she was true. Ah! how dearly I loved her! I do not believe that any man ever loved a woman so fondly, and with such fierce passion as I did. I was hers -- body and soul. My love for her was that deep, all-consuming affection which sometimes makes a man as wax in a woman's hands -- to be moulded for good or for evil as she wills it. I lost all count of time, of friends, of everything, for I lived only for her. The hours when we were parted were to me like years, her words were music, her smiles the sunlight of my life, her sighs the shadows, her kisses the ecstatic bliss of terrestrial paradise in which I lived. Ah!

yes, you who have loved and lost can well understand all that her love meant to me -- you can understand why one dark foggy night I stood upon Charing Cross platform and swore an oath that never again would I put foot in the country which, though my native land, held for me only a poignant memory."