laconically
enough, made his request, lay on his writing-table, and was swept off by
a draught of wind as his valet entered to dress his hair. The latter was
in the habit of trying the heat of the iron by picking up any scraps of
paper which might be lying about. This time his hand fell on the billet;
he twisted it up hastily, and it was burnt. Edward observing the
mistake, snatched it out of his hand. After the man was gone, he sat
himself down to write it over again. The second time it would not run so
readily off his pen. It gave him a little uneasiness; he hesitated, but
he got over it. He squeezed the paper into Ottilie's hand the first
moment he was able to approach her. Ottilie answered him immediately. He
put the note unread in his waistcoat pocket, which, being made short in
the fashion of the time, was shallow, and did not hold it as it ought.
It worked out, and fell without his observing it on the ground.
Charlotte saw it, picked it up, and after giving a hasty glance at it,
reached it to him.

"Here is something in your handwriting," she said, "which you may be
sorry to lose."

He was confounded. Is she dissembling? he thought to himself. Does she
know what is in the note, or is she deceived by the resemblance of the
hand? He hoped, he believed the latter. He was warned--doubly warned;
but those strange accidents, through which a higher intelligence seems
to be speaking to us, his passion was not able to interpret. Rather, as
he went further and further on, he felt the restraint under which his
friend and his wife seemed to be holding him the more intolerable. His
pleasure in their society was gone. His heart was closed against them,
and though he was obliged to endure their society, he could not succeed
in re-discovering or in re-animating within his heart anything of his
old affection for them. The silent reproaches which he was forced to
make to himself about it were disagreeable to him. He tried to help
himself with a kind of humor which, however, being without love, was
also without its usual grace.

Over all such trials Charlotte found assistance to rise in her own
inward feelings. She knew her own determination. Her own affection, fair
and noble as it was, she would utterly renounce.

And sorely she longed to go to the assistance of the other two.
Separation, she knew well, would not alone suffice to heal so deep a
wound. She resolved that she would speak openly about it to Ottilie
herself. But