of prosaic sentiments which are as necessary to family life as air to the lungs; and without which no happiness is possible.  To act as an honest man, to think as a poet, to love as women love, that is what I longed for in my friend, and it is now no longer a chimera.

Adieu, my friend.  I am poor at this moment.  That is one of the reasons why I cling to my concealment, my mask, my impregnable fortress.  I have read your last verses in the “Revue,”—­ah! with what delight, now that I am initiated in the austere loftiness of your secret soul.

Will it make you unhappy to know that a young girl prays for you; that you are her solitary thought,—­without a rival except in her father and mother?  Can there be any reason why you should reject these pages full of you, written for you, seen by no eye but yours?  Send me their counterpart.  I am so little of a woman yet that your confidences—­provided they are full and true—­will suffice for the happiness of your

O. d’Este M.

“Good heavens! can I be in love already?” cried the young secretary, when he perceived that he had held the above letter in his hands more than an hour after reading it.  “What shall I do?  She thinks she is writing to the great poet!  Can I continue the deception?  Is she a woman of forty, or a girl of twenty?”

Ernest was now fascinated by the great gulf of the unseen.  The unseen is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring.  In that sombre vastness fires flash, and furrow and color the abyss with fancies like those of Martin.  For a busy man like Canalis, an adventure of this kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain torrent, but in the more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this charming girl, whom his imagination persistently connected with the blonde beauty at the window, fastened upon his heart, and did as much mischief in his regulated life as a fox in a poultry-yard.  La Briere allowed himself to be preoccupied by this mysterious correspondent; and he answered her last letter with another, a pretentious and carefully studied epistle, in which, however, passion begins to reveal itself through pique.

Mademoiselle,—­Is it quite loyal in you to enthrone yourself in the heart of a poor poet with a latent intention of abandoning him if he is not exactly what you wish, leaving him to endless regrets,—­showing him for a moment an image of perfection, were it only assumed, and at any rate giving him a foretaste of happiness?  I was very short-sighted in soliciting this letter, in which you have begun to unfold the elegant fabric of your thoughts.  A man can easily become enamored with a mysterious unknown who combines such fearlessness with such originality, so much imagination with so much feeling.  Who would not wish to know you after reading your first confidence?  It requires a strong effort on my part to retain my senses in thinking of you, for you combine all that can trouble