“O mia cara diva, keep up your music, exercise your voice, practise.  I am enchanted with the coincidence of employments and hours by which, though separated by the Alps, we live by precisely the same rule.  The thought charms me and gives me courage.  The first time I undertook to plead here—­I forget to tell you this—­I fancied that you were listening to me, and I suddenly felt the flash of inspiration which lifts the poet above mankind.  If I am returned to the Chamber—­oh! you must come to Paris to be present at my first appearance there!

“30th, Evening.

“Good heavens, how I love you!  Alas!  I have intrusted too much to my love and my hopes.  An accident which should sink that overloaded bark would end my life.  For three years now I have not seen you, and at the thought of going to Belgirate my heart beats so wildly that I am forced to stop.—­To see you, to hear that girlish caressing voice!  To embrace in my gaze that ivory skin, glistening under the candlelight, and through which I can read your noble mind!  To admire your fingers playing on the keys, to drink in your whole soul in a look, in the tone of an Oime or an Alberto!  To walk by the blossoming orange-trees, to live a few months in the bosom of that glorious scenery!—­That is life.  What folly it is to run after power, a name, fortune!  But at Belgirate there is everything; there is poetry, there is glory!  I ought to have made myself your steward, or, as that dear tyrant whom we cannot hate proposed to me, live there as cavaliere servente, only our passion was too fierce to allow of it.

“Farewell, my angel, forgive me my next fit of sadness in consideration of this cheerful mood; it has come as a beam of light from the torch of Hope, which has hitherto seemed to me a Will-o’-the-wisp.”

“How he loves her!” cried Rosalie, dropping the letter, which seemed heavy in her hand.  “After eleven years to write like this!”

“Mariette,” said Mademoiselle de Watteville to her maid next morning, “go and post this letter.  Tell Jerome that I know all I wish to know, and that he is to serve Monsieur Albert faithfully.  We will confess our sins, you and I, without saying to whom the letters belonged, nor to whom they were going.  I was in the wrong; I alone am guilty.”

“Mademoiselle has been crying?” said Mariette.

“Yes, but I do not want that my mother should perceive it; give me some very cold water.”

In the midst of the storms of her passion Rosalie often listened to the voice of conscience.  Touched by the beautiful fidelity of these two hearts, she had just said her prayers, telling herself that there was nothing left to her but to be resigned, and to respect the happiness of two beings worthy of each other, submissive to fate, looking to God for everything, without allowing themselves any criminal acts or wishes.  She felt a better woman, and had a certain sense of satisfaction after coming to this resolution, inspired by the natural rectitude of youth.  And she was confirmed in it by a girl’s idea:  She was sacrificing herself for him.