Berenice by E. Phillips Oppenheim

A man wrote it, from his little room in the heart of London, whilst night faded into morning. He wrote it with leaden heart and unwilling mechanical effort--wrote it as a man might write his own doom. Every fresh sentence, which stared up at him from the closely written sheets seemed like another landmark in his sad descent from the pinnacles of his late wonderful happiness down into the black waters of despair. When he had finished, and the pen slipped from his stiff, nerveless fingers, there were lines and marks in his face which had never been there before, and which could never altogether pass away.

.A woman read it, seated on a shelving slant of moorland with the blue sky overhead, and the soft murmur of the sea in her ears, and the sunlight streaming around her. When she had finished, and the letter had fallen to her side, crushed into a shapeless mass, the light had died out of the sky and the air, and the song of the birds had changed into a wail. And this was what the man had said to the woman: