make him enter on the subject
at once--without wasting time in phrases to prepare me for what was to
come.

"When my aunt mentioned that letter at dinner yesterday," I said, "I
fancied that you knew something about it. Was I right?"

"Very nearly right," he answered. "I can't say I knew anything about it.
I only suspected that it was the production of an enemy of yours and
mine."

"Not Madame Pratolungo?"

"Yes! Madame Pratolungo."

I disagreed with him at the outset. Madame Pratolungo and my aunt had
quarreled about politics. Any correspondence between them--a confidential
correspondence especially--seemed to be one of the most unlikely things
that could take place. I asked Oscar if he could guess what the letter
contained, and why it was not to be given to me until Grosse reported
that I was quite cured.

"I can't guess at the contents--I can only guess at the object of the
letter," he said.

"What is it?"

"The object which she has had in view from the first--to place every
possible obstacle in the way of my marrying you."

"What interest can she have in doing that?"

"My brother's interest."

"Forgive me, Oscar. I cannot believe it of her."

We were walking, while these words were passing between us. When I said
that, he stopped, and looked at me very earnestly.

"You believed it of her, when you answered my letter," he said.

I admitted that.

"I believed your letter," I replied; "and I shared your opinion of her as
long as she was in the same house with me. Her presence fed my anger and
my horror of her in some way that I can't account for. Now she has left
me--now I have had time to think--there is something in her absence that
pleads for her, and tortures me with doubts if I have done right. I can't
explain it--I don't understand it. I only know that so it is."

He still looked at me more and more attentively. "Your good opinion of
her must have been very firmly rooted to assert itself in this obstinate
manner," he said. "What can she have done to deserve it?"

If I had looked back through all my old recollections of her, and had
recalled them one by one, it would only have ended in making me cry. And
yet, I felt that I ought to stand up for her as long as I could. I
managed to meet the difficulty in this way.

"I will tell you what she did," I said, "after I received your letter.
Fortunately for me, she was not very well that morning; and she
breakfasted in bed. I had plenty of time to c