She had scarcely uttered the words when her conscience whispered to her that she had much better have been silent.  However, the thing was said.  Edward’s features worked violently.  Never had anything stung him more.  He was touched on his tenderest point.  It was his amusement; he followed it like a child.  He never made the slightest pretensions; what gave him pleasure should be treated with forbearance by his friends.  He never thought how intolerable it is for a third person to have his ears lacerated by an unsuccessful talent.  He was indignant; he was hurt in a way which he could not forgive.  He felt himself discharged from all obligations.

The necessity of being with Ottilie, of seeing her, whispering to her, exchanging his confidence with her, increased with every day.  He determined to write to her, and ask her to carry on a secret correspondence with him.  The strip of paper on which he had, laconically enough, made his request, lay on his writing-table, and was swept off by a draught of wind as his valet entered to dress his hair.  The latter was in the habit of trying the heat of the iron by picking up any scraps of paper which might be lying about.  This time his hand fell on the billet; he twisted it up hastily, and it was burnt.  Edward observing the mistake, snatched it out of his hand.  After the man was gone, he sat himself down to write it over again.  The second time it would not run so readily off his pen.  It gave him a little uneasiness; he hesitated, but he got over it.  He squeezed the paper into Ottilie’s hand the first moment he was able to approach her.  Ottilie answered him immediately.  He put the note unread in his waistcoat pocket, which, being made short in the fashion of the time, was shallow, and did not hold it as it ought.  It worked out, and fell without his observing it on the ground.  Charlotte saw it, picked it up, and after giving a hasty glance at it, reached it to him.

“Here is something in your handwriting,” she said, “which you may be sorry to lose.”

He was confounded.  Is she dissembling? he thought to himself.  Does she know what is in the note, or is she deceived by the resemblance of the hand?  He hoped, he believed the latter.  He was warned—­doubly warned; but those strange accidents, through which a higher intelligence seems to be speaking to us, his passion was not able to interpret.  Rather, as he went further and further on, he felt the restraint under which his friend and his wife seemed to be holding him the more intolerable.  His pleasure in their society was gone.  His heart was closed against them, and though he was obliged to endure their society, he could not succeed in re-discovering or in re-animating within his heart anything of his old affection for them.  The silent reproaches which he was forced to make to himself about it were disagreeable to him.  He tried to help himself with a kind of humor which, however, being without love, was also without its usual grace.