ether you will
let me know the whole or part of the contents."

"Always the same want of will power!" returned Schrotter. "First you
free yourself, and then have not the courage to burn your ships behind
you. Believe me, it is best that you should have no further news from
Paris, and after some months you can send for your things through a
third person. Have you anybody in Paris who could arrange that for you?"

"No."

"Then I will do it. And even if you were to let the things go, it would
be no great loss. Above all things, no renewing of old fetters. This
lackey takes a healthy enough view of the matter, for all his
cynicisms. You must not take it too tragically. You have passed through
your heart crisis--it comes to most of us--only with you it has
happened late, and under unpropitious circumstances. That has tended to
make it more severe than is usually the case. But now, let it be past
and over, though naturally it will take some little time for your mind
to regain its normal balance. What I regret most in the affair is, that
it precludes the idea of marriage for you for some time to come, and I
had wished that so much for you. As long as the fascinations of this
siren are fresh in your memory, no respectable German girl will have
any attraction for you, and the love she is able to offer you will seem
flat and insipid."

"You only speak of me," Wilhelm ventured to remark, "but that is not
the worst side of the story; what weighs most heavily on my mind is,
that I have broken my faith with her."

"Do not let that worry you," Schrotter replied. "You were in such a
position as to be forced to act in self-defense. It would have been
inexcusable in you to have stayed any longer where you were. For a
liaison of that kind is only conceivable when the man loves the woman
very deeply. You, my friend, did not love the lady at all. If you have
any doubts about it in your own mind, you may take my word for it--had
you loved her, you would not have parted from her. You would, if
necessary, have carried her off from Paris, and continued to live with
her in some world-forgotten spot, as you did at St. Valery. Or you
would have gone off to the Philippines, and fought her husband to the
death, in order to gain free possession of her or die in the attempt.
That is how love acts when it is of that elemental force which alone
can justify such relations before the higher natural tribunal of
morality. But if your love is not stron