ver--never! I shall be wretched throughout life: I shall
know that you are free that you--oh! Constance! you might be mine!--but
she shall never dream what she has cost me! I have been too cold, too
ungrateful to her already--I will make her amends. My heart may break
in the effort, but it shall reward her. You, Constance, in the pride
of your lofty station, your strengthened mind, your regulated virtue
(fenced in by the hundred barriers of custom), you cannot, perhaps,
conceive how pure and devoted the soul of this poor girl is! She is not
one whom I could heap riches upon and leave:--my love is all the riches
she knows. Earth has not a consolation or a recompense for the loss of
my affection: and even Heaven itself she has never learned to think of,
except as a place in which we shall be united for ever. As I write this
I know that she is sitting afar off and alone, and thinking only of one
whose whole soul, fated and accursed as he is, is maddened by the love
of another. My letters, her only comfort, have been cold and few of
late; I know how they have wrung her heart. I picture to myself her
solitude--her sadness--her unfriended youth--her ardent mind, which, not
enriched by culture, clings, feeds, lives only on one idea. Before you
receive this, I shall be on the road to her. Never again will I risk
the temptation I have under gone. I am not a vain man; I do not deceive
myself; I do not imagine, I do not insult you by believing, that you
will long or bitterly feel my loss. I have loved you far better than you
have loved me, and you have uncounted channels for your bright hopes
and your various ambition. You love the world, and the world is at
your feet! And in remembering me now, you may think you have cause for
indignation. Why, with the knowledge of a tie that forbade me to hope
for you, why did I linger round you? why did I give vent to any word, or
license to any look, that told you I loved you still? Why, above all, on
that fated yesterday, when we stood alone surrounded by the waters,--why
did I dare forget myself--why clasp you to my breast--why utter the
assurance of that love which was a mockery, if I were not about solemnly
to record it?

"This you will ask; and if you are not satisfied with the answer, your
pride will clothe my memory with resentment. Be it so--yet hear me.
Constance, when, in my first youth, at the time when the wax was yet
soft, and the tree might yet be bent--when I laid my heart and m