Good-bye, dear sister soul, whose affection has never wavered nor grown weary, but has been the constant tender moonlight of my soul.  If the intensity of passion has not been ours, at least we have been spared its venomous bitterness.  How rightly you have judged of life!  Farewell.

LV

THE COMTESSE DE L’ESTORADE TO MME. GASTON
July 16th.

My dear Louise,—­I send this letter by an express before hastening to the chalet myself.  Take courage.  Your last letter seemed to me so frantic, that I thought myself justified, under the circumstances, in confiding all to Louis; it was a question of saving you from yourself.  If the means we have employed have been, like yours, repulsive, yet the result is so satisfactory that I am certain you will approve.  I went so far as to set the police to work, but the whole thing remains a secret between the prefect, ourselves and you.

In one word, Gaston is a jewel!  But here are the facts.  His brother, Louis Gaston, died at Calcutta, while in the service of a mercantile company, when he was on the very point of returning to France, a rich, prosperous, married man, having received a very large fortune with his wife, who was the widow of an English merchant.  For ten years he had worked hard that he might be able to send home enough to support his brother, to whom he was devotedly attached, and from whom his letters generously concealed all his trials and disappointments.

Then came the failure of the great Halmer house; the widow was ruined, and the sudden shock affected Louis Gaston’s brain.  He had no mental energy left to resist the disease which attacked him, and he died in Bengal, whither he had gone to try and realize the remnants of his wife’s property.  The dear, good fellow had deposited with a banker a first sum of three hundred thousand francs, which was to go to his brother, but the banker was involved in the Halmer crash, and thus their last resource failed them.

Louis’ widow, the handsome woman whom you took for your rival, arrived in Paris with two children—­your nephews—­and an empty purse, her mother’s jewels having barely sufficed to pay for bringing them over.  The instructions which Louis Gaston had given the banker for sending the money to his brother enabled the widow to find your husband’s former home.  As Gaston had disappeared without leaving any address, Mme. Louis Gaston was directed to d’Arthez, the only person who could give any information about him.

D’Arthez was the more ready to relieve the young woman’s pressing needs, because Louis Gaston, at the time of his marriage four years before, had written to make inquiries about his brother from the famous author, whom he knew to be one of his friends.  The Captain had consulted d’Arthez as to the best means of getting the money safely transferred to Marie, and d’Arthez had replied, telling him that Gaston was now a rich man through his marriage with the Baronne de Macumer.  The personal beauty, which was the mother’s rich heritage to her sons, had saved them both—­one in India, the other in Paris—­from destitution.  A touching story, is it not?