and your
friends--more friends than anyone I know. If you wish me well, wish that
I may never regret the step I have taken. I look down at my hands that
you loved--I wish I could stretch them out to you....

A man must not let himself be crushed. It would hurt me to feel that
people pitied you. You are much too good to be pitied.

Certainly it would have been better if, as you said, one of us had
died. But in that case you would have had to take the plunge into
eternity, for I am looking forward with joy to life on my island.

For twenty years I have lived under the shadow of your wing in the Old
Market Place. May I live another twenty under the great forest trees,
wedded to solitude.

How the gossips will gossip! But we two, clever people, will laugh at
their gossip.

Forgive me, Richard, to-day and always, the trouble I have brought upon
you. I would have stayed with you if I could. Thank you for all....

ELSIE.

That my feeling for you should have died, is quite as incomprehensible
to me as to you. No other man has ever claimed a corner of my heart. In
a word, having considered the question all round, I am suffering simply
from a nervous malady--alas! it is incurable!

MY DEAR MALTHE,

We two are friends, are we not, and I think we shall always remain so,
even now that fate has severed our ways? If you feel that you have any
good reason for being angry with me now, then, indeed, our friendship
will be broken; for we shall have no further opportunity of becoming
reconciled.

If at this important juncture I not only hid the truth from you, but
deliberately misled you, it was not from any lack of confidence in you,
or with the wish to be unfriendly. I beg you to believe this. The fact
that I cannot even now explain to you my reasons for acting thus makes
it all the more difficult to justify my conduct to you. Therefore you
must be contented to take my word for it. Joergen Malthe, I would gladly
confide in you, but it is impossible. Call it madness, or what you will,
but I cannot allow any human being to penetrate my inner life.

You will not have forgotten that September evening last year, when I
spoke to you for the first time about one of my friends who was going to
separate from her husband, and who, through my intervention, asked you
to draw the plan of a villa in which she might spend the rest of her
days in solitude? You entered so completely into this idea