That he loved her still, he felt sure, as he held in his hand the pages she had written and felt the old thrill he knew so well in his fingers, and the old, quick beating of the heart.  But he acknowledged gladly—­too gladly, perhaps—­that he had done well to let her go.

Then came the second impression.  “I like to remember the time when you used to talk to me of all your plans.”  The words rang in his ears and called up delicious visions of the past, soft hours spent by her side while she listened with something warmer than patience to the outpouring of his young hopes and aspirations.  She, at least, had understood him, and encouraged him, and strengthened him with her sympathy.  And why not now, if then?  Why should she not understand him now, when he most needed a friend, and give him sympathy now, when he stood most in need of it?  She was in Egypt and he in Rome, it was true.  But what of that?  If she could write to him, he could write to her, and she could answer him again.  No one had ever felt with him as she had.

He did not hesitate long.  On that same evening, after dinner, he went back to his own room and wrote to her.  It was a little hard at first, but, as the ink flowed, he expressed himself better and more clearly.  With an odd sort of caution, which had grown upon him of late, he tried to make his letter take a form as similar to hers as possible.

“My dear friend” (he wrote)—­“If people always yielded to their impulses as you have done in writing to me, there would be more good fellowship and less loneliness in the world.  It would not be easy for me to tell you how great a pleasure you have given me.  Perhaps, hereafter, I may compare it to your own memory of the Kiew candied fruits!  For the present I do not find a worthy comparison to my hand.

“You ask many questions.  I propose to answer them all.  Will you have the patience to read what I write?  I hope so, for the sake of the time when I used to talk to you of all my plans—­and which you say you like to remember.  For another reason, too.  I have never felt so lonely in my life as I feel now, nor so much in need of a friend—­not a helping friend, but one to whom I can speak a little freely.  I am very much alone.  A sort of estrangement has grown up between my mother and me, and she no longer takes my side in all I want to do, as she did once.

“I will be quite plain.  I will tell you all my troubles, because there is not another person in the world to whom I could tell them—­and because I know that they will not trouble you.  You will feel a little friendly sympathy, and that will be enough.  But you will feel no pain.  After all, I daresay that I exaggerate, and that there is nothing so very painful in the matter, as it will strike you.  But the case is serious, as you will see.  It involves my life, perhaps for many years to come.

“I am completely in Del Ferice’s