He rose at dawn, and, lighting the gas, went back to bed with what paper he could lay his hands on.  He had no pen, no ink, only the stub of a pencil he carried in his pocket.  How it flew over the ragged sheets under the fierce spell of his determination!  All the misery and longing of months went out in that letter.  Inarticulate no longer, he found the expression of a passionate and despairing eloquence.  He could not live without her; he loved her; he had always loved her; before he had been daunted by the inequality between them, but now he must speak or die.  At the end he asked her, in set old-fashioned terms, whether or not she would marry him.

He mailed it as it was, in odd sheets and under the cover of an official envelope of the railroad company.  He dropped it into the box and walked away, wondering whether he wasn’t the biggest fool on earth and the most audacious, and yet stirred and trembling with a strange satisfaction.  After all he was a man; he had lived as a man should, honorably and straightforwardly; he had the right to ask such a question of any woman and the right to an honest and considerate answer.  Be it yes or no, he could reproach himself no longer with perhaps having let his happiness slip past him.  The matter would be put beyond a doubt for ever, and if it went against him, as in the bottom of his heart he felt assured it would, he would try to bear it with what fortitude he might.  She would know that he loved her.  There was always that to comfort him.  She would know that he loved her.

He got a postal guide and studied out the mails.  He learned the names of the various steamers, the date of their sailing and arriving, the distance of Vevey from the sea.  Were she to write on the same day she received his letter, he might hear from her by the Touraine.  Were she to wait a day, her answer would be delayed for the Normandie.  All this, if the schedule was followed to the letter and bad weather or accident did not intervene.  The shipping page of the New York Herald became the only part of it he read.  He scanned it daily with anxiety.  Did it not tell him of his letter speeding over seas?  For him no news was good news, telling him that all was well.  He kept himself informed of the temperature of Paris, the temperature of Nice, and worried over the floods in Belgium.  From the gloomy offices of the railroad he held all Europe under the closest scrutiny.

Then came the time when his letter was calculated to arrive.  In his mind’s eye he saw the Grand Hotel at Vevey, a Waldorf-Astoria set in snowy mountains with attendant Swiss yodelling on inaccessible summits, or getting marvels of melody out of little hand-bells, or making cuckoo clocks in top-swollen chalets.  The letter would be brought to her on a silver salver, exciting perhaps the stately curiosity of Mrs. Quintan and questions embarrassing to answer.  It was a pity he used that railroad envelope!  Or would it lie beside her plate at breakfast, as clumsy and unrefined as himself, amid a heap of scented notes from members of the nobility?  Ah, if he could but see her face and read his fate in her blue eyes!