I write it in all truth, and perfect respect for you—­I only saw in your attentions the flirting habits of a man of the world, with a very uninformed and ignorant girl of eighteen, with whom as it was his amusement to travel, he deemed it worth his while to talk.  I now see, and bitterly regret my error, yet deem it better to make this painful confession than suffer you to remain in a delusion which may involve your happiness in the wreck of mine.  I am most faithfully your friend,

“Emily Bingham.”

What a charming girl she is, I cried, as I finished the letter; how full of true feeling, how honourably, how straight-forward:  and yet it is devilish strange how cunningly she played her part—­and it seems now that I never did touch her affections; Master Harry, I begin to fear you are not altogether the awful lady-killer you have been thinking.  Thus did I meditate upon this singular note—­my delight at being once more “free” mingling with some chagrin that I was jockied, and by a young miss of eighteen, too.  Confoundedly disagreeable if the mess knew it, thought I. Per Baccho—­how they would quiz upon my difficulty to break off a match, when the lady was only anxious to get rid of me.

This affair must never come to their ears, or I am ruined; and now, the sooner all negociations are concluded the better.  I must obtain a meeting with Emily.  Acknowledge the truth and justice of all her views, express my deep regret at the issue of the affair, slily hint that I have been merely playing her own game back upon her; for it would be the devil to let her go off with the idea that she had singed me, yet never caught fire herself; so that we both shall draw stakes, and part friends.

This valiant resolution taken, I wrote a very short note, begging an interview, and proceeded to make as formidable a toilet as I could for the forthcoming meeting; before I had concluded which, a verbal answer by her maid informed me, that “Miss Bingham was alone, and ready to receive me.”

As I took my way along the corridor, I could not help feeling that among all my singular scrapes and embarassing situations through life, my present mission was certainly not the least—­the difficulty, such as it was, being considerably increased by my own confounded “amour propre,” that would not leave me satisfied with obtaining my liberty, if I could not insist upon coming off scathless also.  In fact, I was not content to evacuate the fortress, if I were not to march out with all the honours of war.  This feeling I neither attempt to palliate nor defend, I merely chronicle it as, are too many of these confessions, a matter of truth, yet not the less a subject for sorrow.