HECTOR, MY BELOVED!—­Oh, for this last time I must think of you as that!  Dearest, we are parted now and may never meet again, and the pain of it all kept me silent yesterday, when my heart was breaking with the anguish and longing to tell you how I loved you, how you were not going away suffering alone.  Oh, it has all crept upon us, this great, great love!  It was fate, and it was useless to struggle against it.  Only we must not let it be the reason of our doing wrong—­that would be to degrade it, and love should not live in an atmosphere of degradation.  I could not go away with you, could not have you for my lover without breaking a bargain—­a bargain over which I have given my word.  Of course I did not know what love meant when I was married.  In France one does not think of that as connected with a husband.  It was just a duty to be got through to help papa and my sisters.  But my part of the bargain was myself, and in return for giving that I have money and a home, and papa and Sarah and Clementine are comfortable and happy.  And as Josiah has kept his side of it, so I must keep mine, and be faithful to him always in word and deed.  Dearest, it is too terrible to think of this material aspect to a bond which now I know should only be one of love and faith and tenderness.  But it is a bond, and I have given my word, and no happiness could come to us if I should break it, as Josiah has not broken his.  And oh, Hector, you do not know how good he has always been to me, and generous and indulgent!  It is not his fault that he is not of our class, and I must do my utmost to make him happy, and atone for this wound which I have unwittingly given him, and which he is, and must always remain, unconscious of.  Oh, if something could have warned me, after that first time we met, that I would love you—­had begun to love you—­even then there would have been time to draw back, to save us both, perhaps, from suffering.  And yet, and yet, I do not know, we might have missed the greatest and noblest good of all our lives.  Dearest, I want you to keep the memory of me as something happy.  Each year, when the spring-time comes and the young fresh green, I want you to look back on our day at Versailles, and to say to yourself, ’Life cannot be all sad, because nature gave the earth the returning spring.’  And some spring must come for us, too—­if only in our hearts.

     “And now, O my beloved, good-bye!  I cannot even tell to you the
     anguish which is wringing my heart.  It is all summed up in this.  I
     love you!  I love you! and we must say forever a farewell!

     “THEODORA.

     “P.S.—­I am sending this to your home.”

As he read the last words the paper slipped from Josiah’s nerveless hands, and for many minutes he sat as one stricken blind and dumb.  Then his poor, plebeian figure seemed to crumple up, and with an inarticulate cry of rage and despair he fell forward, with his head upon his out-stretched arms across the breakfast-table.