Even before Felix left Frankfort there were some who were in his secret.  Evidently the Mendelssohn family had received reports of his attentions to the fair Cecile Jeanrenaud and were all a-flutter with happy anticipation.  For there is a letter from Felix to his sister Rebecca which must have been written in answer to one from her containing something in the nature of an inquiry regarding the state of his feelings.  “The present period in my life,” he writes to her, “is a very strange one, for I am more desperately in love than I ever was before, and I do not know what to do.  I leave Frankfort the day after to-morrow, but I feel as if it would cost me my life.  At all events I intend to return here and see this charming girl once more before I go back to Leipsic.  But I have not an idea whether she likes me or not, and I do not know what to do to make her like me, as I already have said.  But one thing is certain—­that to her I owe the first real happiness I have had this year, and now I feel fresh and hopeful again for the first time.  When away from her, though, I always am sad—­now, you see, I have let you into a secret which nobody else knows anything about; but in order that you may set the whole world an example in discretion, I will tell you nothing more about it.”  He adds that he is going to detest the seashore, and ends with the exclamation, “O Rebecca!  What shall I do?” Rebecca might have answered, “Tell Cecile, instead of me;” and, indeed, I wonder if she did not take occasion to drop a few hints to Cecile during her brother’s absence in Holland.

There was another who might have told Cecile how Felix felt toward her,—­his mother.  For to her he wrote from Scheveningen that he gladly would send Holland, its dykes, sea baths, bathing-machines, Kursaals and visitors to the end of the world to be back in Frankfort.  “When I have seen this charming girl again, I hope the suspense soon will be over and I shall know whether we are to be anything—­or rather everything—­to each other, or not.”  Evidently his scrutiny of his own feelings was leading him to a very definite conclusion.  He was in Scheveningen, but his heart was in the city on the Main, and he was wishing himself back in the Schoene Aussicht—­longing for that “beautiful view” once more.

Back to Frankfort he hied himself as soon as the month in Holland was happily over.  It was not only back to Frankfort, it was back to Cecile, in every sense of the words; for if Rebecca and his mother had not conveyed to the delicate beauty some suggestion of the feelings she had inspired in Felix’s heart, she herself must have become aware of them, and of something very much like in her own, since matters were not long in coming to a point after his return.  He spent August at Scheveningen; in September his suspense was over, for his engagement to Cecile formally took place at Kronberg, near Frankfort.  Three weeks later he was obliged to go back to his duties