happened to the sheep I don't know. Probably Aunt Winifred has eaten
them since without knowing it.

"Dear Nora--I wonder why I write you all these silly things when there
is so much else to say--and I know you want to hear it. But it's
horribly difficult to begin.--Well, first of all, Mr. Sorell and Otto
Radowitz are about three miles from here, in a little vicarage that has
a wide lookout upon the moors and a heavenly air. The aunts have found
me a horse, and I go there often. Otto is in some ways very much better.
He lives an ordinary life, walks a fair amount, and is reading some
classics and history with Mr. Sorell, besides endless books of musical
theory and biography. You know he passed his first musical exam last
May. For the second, which will come off next year, he has to write a
composition in five-part harmony for at least five stringed instruments,
and he is beginning work for it now. He writes and writes, and his
little study at the vicarage is strewn deep in scribbled music-paper.
With his left hand and his piano he does wonders, but the poor right
hand is in a sling and quite useless, up to now. He reads scores
endlessly, and he said to me yesterday that he thought his intellectual
understanding of music--his power of grasping it through the eye--of
hearing it with the mind--'ditties of no tone!'--had grown since his
hand was injured. But the pathetic thing is that the sheer pleasure--the
joy and excitement--of his life is gone; those long hours of dreaming
and composing with the piano, when he could not only make himself
blissfully happy, but give such exquisite pleasure to others.

"He is very quiet and patient now--generally--and quite determined to
make a name for himself as a composer. But he seems to me
extraordinarily frail. Do you remember that lovely French poem of Sully
Prudhomme's I read you one night--'_Le Vase Brise_'? The vase has had a
blow. No one knew of it. But the little crack widens and grows. The
water ebbs away--the flowers die. '_Il est brise_--_n'y touchez pas_!' I
can see it is just that Mr. Sorell feels about Otto.

"What makes one anxious sometimes, is that he has hours of a kind of
fierce absent-mindedness, when his real self seems to be far away--as
though in some feverish or ugly dream. He goes away and wanders about by
himself. Mr. Sorell does not attempt to follow him, though he is always
horribly anxious. And after some hours he comes back, limp and worn out,
but quite