But where, pray, did I say, and when, that ’everything would end well?’ Was that in the dream, when we two met on the stairs?  I did not really say so I think.  And ‘well’ is how you understand it.  If you jump out of the window you succeed in getting to the ground, somehow, dead or alive ... but whether that means ‘ending well,’ depends on your way of considering matters.  I am seriously of opinion nevertheless, that if ‘the arm,’ you talk of, drops, it will not be for weariness nor even for weakness, but because it is cut off at the shoulder. I will not fail to you,—­may God so deal with me, so bless me, so leave me, as I live only for you and shall.  Do you doubt that, my only beloved!  Ah, you know well—­too well, people would say ... but I do not think it ‘too well’ myself, ... knowing you.

Your

BA.

Here is a gossip which Mr. Kenyon brought me on Sunday—­disbelieving it himself, he asseverated, though Lady Chantrey said it ’with authority,’—­that Mr. Harness had offered his hand heart and ecclesiastical dignities to Miss Burdett Coutts.  It is Lady Chantrey’s and Mr. Kenyon’s secret, remember.

And ... will you tell me?  How can a man spend four or five successive months on the sea, most cheaply—­at the least pecuniary expense, I mean?  Because Miss Mitford’s friend Mr. Buckingham is ordered by his medical adviser to complete his cure by these means; and he is not rich.  Could he go with sufficient comfort by a merchant’s vessel to the Mediterranean ... and might he drift about among the Greek islands?

R.B. to E.B.B.

Tuesday.

‘Out of window’ would be well, as I see the leap, if it ended (so far as I am concerned) in the worst way imaginable—­I would I ’run the risk’ (Ba’s other word) rationally, deliberately,—­knowing what the ordinary law of chances in this world justifies in such a case; and if the result after all was unfortunate, it would be far easier to undergo the extremest penalty with so little to reproach myself for,—­than to put aside the adventure,—­waive the wondrous probability of such best fortune, in a fear of the barest possibility of an adverse event, and so go to my grave, Walter the Penniless, with an eternal recollection that Miss Burdett Coutts once offered to wager sundry millions with me that she could throw double-sixes a dozen times running—­which wager I wisely refused to accept because it was not written in the stars that such a sequence might never be.  I had rather, rather a thousand-fold lose my paltry stake, and be the one recorded victim to such an unexampled unluckiness that half a dozen mad comets, suns gone wrong, and lunatic moons must have come laboriously into conjunction for my special sake to bring it to pass, which were no slight honour, properly considered!—­And this is my way of laughing, dearest Ba, when the excess of belief