it comes my broken heart will never have a moment of repose; but I shall employ this time in working for him, for the brother, for the child, for the cherished being who will come to me aged and desperate; and I wish that he may yet believe in something good, that he will not imagine everything in this world is unjust and infamous, for he will return to me weighed down by twenty years of shame, of degrading and undeserved shame.  How will he bear these twenty years?  What efforts must I not make to prove to him that he should not abandon himself to despair, and that life often offers the remedy, compassion to the most profound, to the most unjust human sorrows?  How can I make him believe that?  How lead his poor heart, closed to confidence, to feeling, to the tears that alone can relieve it?  God who has so sorely tried me, without doubt will come to my aid, and will inspire me with words of consolation, will show me the path to follow, and give me the strength to persevere.  Have I not already to thank Him for being alone in the world, outside of a mother and brother who will not betray me?  I have no children, and I am spared the terror of seeing a soul growing in evil, an intelligence escaping from me to follow the path of infamy or dishonor.  I leave, then, as I came.  I was a poor girl, I go away a poor woman.  I have taken the clothing and personal effects that I brought into our common home, nothing that was bought with your money; and I forbid you to interfere with my wish in this question of material things, as well as in my resolution to fly from you.  Nothing can ever reunite us; nothing shall reunite us, no consideration, no necessity.  I reject the past, this guilty past, the responsibility of which weighs so heavily on my conscience, and I should like to lose the memory of the detested time.  It would be impossible for me to accept the struggle, or supplications, if you think it expedient to make any.  I have cut our bonds, and hereafter we shall be as far apart as if one of us were dead, or even farther.  Have no scruples, then, in leaving me alone to face a new life, a beginning that may appear difficult to one not situated as I am.  The trials of former times were good for me, since they accustomed me to the difficulties of work.  The desolation of to-day will sustain me, in the sense that having suffered all I can suffer, I no longer fear some discouraging catastrophe that will check me in my resolutions.  In order not to compromise you, and more fully to become myself again, I shall take my family name—­a dishonored name—­but I shall bear it without shame.  I shall live obscurely, absorbed in work and in trying to forget your existence; do the same yourself.  If you think of the past, you will find, perhaps, that I am hard; yet this departure is not an egotistic desertion.  I am no good to you, and the repose that you want would shun you hereafter in my presence.  On the contrary, strive for forgetfulness, as I shall.  If you contrive to wipe out of your life the part