e best: he is used to it. You know how gentle she is
though she is so firm.'

'Oh! don't torture me, ma'am, for God's sake,' I called aloud.

CHAPTER LV

I MEET MY FIRST PLAYFELLOW AND TAKE MY PUNISHMENT

There came to me a little note on foreign paper, unaddressed, an
enclosure forwarded by Janet, and containing merely one scrap from the
playful XENIEN of Ottilia's favourite brotherly poets, of untranslatable
flavour:--

Who shuns true friends flies fortune in the concrete:
Would he see what he aims at? let him ask his heels.

It filled me with a breath of old German peace.

From this I learnt that Ottilia and Janet corresponded. Upon what topics?
to what degree of intimacy?

Janet now confessed to me that their intimacy had never known reserve.
The princess had divined her attachment for Harry Richmond when their
acquaintance was commenced in the island, and knew at the present moment
that I had travelled round to the recognition of Janet's worth.

Thus encouraged by the princess's changeless friendship, I wrote to her,
leaving little to be guessed of my state of mind, withholding nothing of
the circumstances surrounding me. Imagination dealt me all my sharpest
misery, and now that Ottilia resumed her place there, I became infinitely
peacefuller, and stronger to subdue my hungry nature. It caused me no
pang, strangely though it read in my sight when written, to send warm
greetings and respects to the prince her husband.

Is it any waste of time to write of love? The trials of life are in it,
but in a narrow ring and a fierier. You may learn to know yourself
through love, as you do after years of life, whether you are fit to lift
them that are about you, or whether you are but a cheat, and a load on
the backs of your fellows. The impure perishes, the inefficient
languishes, the moderate comes to its autumn of decay--these are of the
kinds which aim at satisfaction to die of it soon or late. The love that
survives has strangled craving; it lives because it lives to nourish and
succour like the heavens.

But to strangle craving is indeed to go through a death before you reach
your immortality.

But again, to write of a love perverted by all the elements contributing
to foolishness, and foredoomed to chastisement, would be a graceless
business. Janet and I went through our trial, she, you may believe, the
braver under the most to bear.

I was taken by Temple down to the ship--smelling East