"But you can give me also his word, if you will," she said, beseechingly. "Oh, my dear, dear friend, I too have suffered, and I believe that what I have endured is the worst of pain, for it comes from the knowledge of wrong to another. You cannot take away that pain, but perhaps you can restore to me a lost ideal. I had come to think that there was no such thing as love--real love--in the world; to believe not only that the man who had professed it for me was false in that profession, but that it really did not exist. Let me see that letter. It is an impersonal thing to me now, but I feel that it would strengthen me for all my future life. I am going to try to be good; indeed I am," she said, her lips trembling like a child's. "If I feel that that letter would help me, why may I not see it?" The rector hesitated visibly; then he said: "You shall see it, Bettina. I cannot feel that it will do any harm, and it will be an act of justice, perhaps, to him as well as to you. Whoever represented him to be lacking in depth of feeling has done him a wrong indeed. I had no need to have this proved to me, but if there be such a need in any breast, the reading of this letter must do away with it." In a few moments he rose to take leave, having promised to send the letter to her. "Will you send it at once?" she asked. "May Nora go with you and bring it back?" In the stress of her feeling she forgot the impression that her eagerness might make; but it had not been lost upon the rector, who pondered all these things in his heart as he went homeward. When he had given the letter to Nora, and she had taken it to her mistress, he wondered if he had done well. Bettina had not pretended that she had really loved the man to whom she had first engaged herself. The preoccupied interest and affection which she had given him then were not misrepresented in her confession to the rector, and she had been absolutely silent as to her subsequent and present feeling toward him. All that she said, the whole burden of her song, was that she had so wronged him in that past time; never once had she hinted at the possibility of any renewal of relations between them. In spite of all this, the rector knew Bettina well, and he recognized the fact that she was under the dominion of some larger and deeper feeling than he had ever known her to have except her affection for her mother. And had even that, he asked himself, so permeated her whole being--mind, soul, and character--as this feeling in which he now saw her so absorbed? He answered that it had not. It was, therefore, taking a certain responsibility upon himself to show this letter. But he was acting in the interest of truth and justice, and he could not find it in his heart to regret what he had done.