I missed the flower from my hair when I went back to my room last night.  Did you take it, dear?  If so, do not cherish it.  I hate to think of anything withering on your breast.  My love is deathless, James, and owns no such symbol as that.  But perhaps you are not thinking of my love, but of my faults.  If so, let the flower remain where you have put it; and when you gaze on it say, “Thus is it with the defects of my darling; once in full bloom, now a withered remembrance.  When I gathered her they began to fade.”  O James, I feel as if I never could feel anger again.

Dear James: 

I do not, I cannot, believe it.  Though you said to me on going out, “Your father will explain,” I cannot content myself with his explanations and will never believe what he said of you except you confirm his accusations by your own act.  If, after I have told you exactly what passed between us, you return me this and other letters, then I shall know that I have leaned my weight on a hollow staff, and that henceforth I am to be without protector or comforter in this world.

O James, were we not happy!  I believed in you and felt that you believed in me.  When we stood heart to heart under the elm tree (was it only last night?) and you swore that if it lay in the power of earthly man to make me happy, I should taste every sweet that a woman’s heart naturally craved, I thought my heaven had already come and that now it only remained for me to create yours.  Yet that very minute my father was approaching us, and in another instant we heard these words: 

“James, I must talk with you before you make my daughter forget herself any further.”  Forget herself!  What had happened?  This was not the way my father had been accustomed to talk, much as he had always favoured the suit of Philemon Webb, and pleased as he would have been had my choice fallen on him.  Forget herself!  I looked at you to see how these insulting words would affect you.  But while you turned pale, or seemed to do so in the fading moonlight, you were not quite so unprepared for them as I was myself, and instead of showing anger, followed my father into the house, leaving me shivering in a spot which had held no chill for me a moment before.  You were gone—­how long?  To me it seemed an hour, and perhaps it was.  It would seem to take that long for a man’s face to show such change as yours did when you confronted me again in the moonlight.  Yet a lightning stroke makes quick work, and perhaps my countenance in that one minute showed as great a change as yours.  Else why did you shudder away from me, and to my passionate appeal reply with this one short phrase:  “Your father will explain”?  Did you think any other words than yours would satisfy me, or that I could believe even him when he accused you of a base and dishonest act?  Much as I have always loved and revered my father, I find it impossible not to hope that in his wish to see me united to Philemon he has resorted to an unworthy subterfuge to separate us; therefore I give you our interview word for word.  May it shock you as much as it shocked me.  Here is what he said first: