However, to return to the writer of "The Strange Confessions." The number of the journal containing his article had not been published more than a couple of days, before I received a letter signed by a lady who was unknown to me, asking that I would favour her with the address of the contributor. I replied, of course, that I could not do so without his permission, but that if she wished to be put into communication with him, and would send a letter addressed to the office of the paper, it should be duly forwarded. She did so, and when, as was natural enough, he wrote a cordial reply, she found something else in his letter about which to question him, and a correspondence consequently ensued. Whether she was or was not a heartless and accomplished flirt I never knew; but if ever a woman deliberately set herself to win, and--as subsequent events showed--to break a man's heart, it was this lady. I learned afterwards that she was very beautiful, and as she herself wrote occasional tales and verses for the magazines, it was not to be wondered at that my contributor should be greatly interested in her epistles. She succeeded before long in making his acquaintance, and set herself to carry on in earnest the work which her insinuating letters had begun. She did not, however, find him quite the easy prey which she had perhaps expected; for though it is certain that he loved her from the moment of meeting, he was shy and self-depreciatory, and sought persistently to avoid her. But she paused at nothing to effect her purpose. She had set her heart upon "a scalp," and by looks, words, and deeds, she strove to convince him that she loved him, and strove at last successfully. I remember meeting him one morning, and thinking, as I watched the light which came into his face when he spoke of her, of the graceful lines in Mr. Austin Dobson's "Story of Rosina." In the poem, however, it is the woman, and not the man, who is heart-broken:-- "As for the girl, she turned to her new being, Came, as a bird that hears its fellow call; Blessed as the blind that blesses God for seeing; Grew as a flower on which the sun-rays fall, Loved if you will; she never named it so; Love comes unseen, we only see it go." When I saw him again all was over. I had sought him out in his chambers, not having heard from him for a month, and he did not hear me enter. Her portrait (the one she had given him) was before him, and he had fallen by the table, half-kneeling, half-lying, with his head on his arm. It is a fearful thing to hear a strong man sob as he was sobbing then! God grant that I may never hear another, or see a face of such hopeless haggard misery as was his when he raised it!