’You are one of those who seem to have been born without much interest in religion or fear of the here-after, and in a way I am like you, but with a difference:  I acquiesced in early childhood, and accepted traditional beliefs, and tried to find happiness in the familiar rather than in the unknown.  Whether I should have found the familiar enough if I hadn’t met you, I shall never know.  I’ve thought a good deal on this subject, and it has come to seem to me that we are too much in the habit of thinking of the intellect and the flesh as separate things, whereas they are but one thing.  I could write a great deal on this subject, but I stop, as it were, on the threshold of my thought, for this is no time for philosophical writing.  I am all a-tremble, and though my brain is working quickly, my thoughts are not mature and deliberate.  My brain reminds me at times of the skies that followed Father Moran’s visit—­skies restlessly flowing, always different and always the same.  These last days are merciless days, and I have to write to you in order to get some respite from purposeless thinking.  Sometimes I stop in my walk to ask myself who I am and what I am, and where I am going.  Will you be shocked to hear that, when I awoke and heard the wind howling, I nearly got out of bed to pray to God, to thank him for having sent Moran to warn me from crossing the lake?  I think I did say a prayer, thanking him for his mercy.  Then I felt that I should pray to him for grace that I might remain at home and be a good priest always, but that prayer I couldn’t formulate, and I suffered a great deal.  I know that such vacillations between belief and unbelief are neither profitable nor admirable; I know that to pray to God to thank him for having saved me from death while in mortal sin, and yet to find myself unable to pray to him to do his will, is illogical, and I confess that my fear is now lest old beliefs will claim me before the time comes.  A poor, weak, tried mortal man am I, but being what I am, I cannot be different.  I am calm enough now, and it seems as if my sufferings were at an end; but to-morrow some new fear will rise up like mist, and I shall be enveloped.  What an awful thing it would be if I should find myself without will on the fifteenth, or the sixteenth, or the seventeenth of August!  If the wind should rise again, and the lake be windy while the moon is full, my chance for leaving here this summer will be at an end.  The water will be too cold in September.

’And now you know all, and if you don’t get a letter from New York, understand that what appears in the newspapers is true—­that I was drowned whilst bathing.  I needn’t apologize for this long letter; you will understand that the writing of it has taken me out of myself, and that is a great gain.  There is no one else to whom I can write, and it pleases me to know this.  I am sorry for my sisters in the convent; they will believe me dead.  I have a brother in America, the one who sent the harmonium that you used to play on so beautifully.  He will believe in my death, unless we meet in America, and that is not likely.  I look forward to writing to you from New York.