“Enough that in this crisis I suffered--suffered as I have never suffered since that day. My search was in vain; nor were the efforts of the men whom I sent in all directions of the coast--by the cliff and by the sands--of more avail. For two days and two nights I suffered the tortures of Cain. I told myself that this girl’s blood was upon my head; and if, in that hour when the thought of her untimely death was so keen and unendurable an agony, she could have appeared suddenly before me, I think I should have thrown myself at her feet and offered her the devotion of my life, the legal right to bear my name. “She did not so appear, and the hour passed. Upon the third morning, after a delay that had seemed an eternity of torture, the post brought me a letter from C. She was at E----, whither she had gone, after long brooding upon my inconstancy. ‘I will not try to tell you all I have suffered,’ she wrote; ‘my most passionate words would seem to you cold and meaningless when measured against those Greek poets whose verse is your standard for every feeling. I will only say you have broken my heart. My story begins and ends in that one sentence. There must come an end even to such worship as mine. Oh! H., you have been very cruel to me! I have seen you with the beautiful foreign lady, whose society has been pleasanter to you than mine. Your carriage drove past me one day, as I stood half-hidden by the bushes upon a sloping bank above the road, and I heard her joyous laugh, and saw your head bent over her long dark ringlets, and knew that you were happy with her. ‘From the hour in which I discovered how utterly you had deceived me, my life has been one continued struggle with despair. You do not know how I loved those whom I left for your sake. In all the passion and pain of your Greek poetry, I doubt if there is a sentence strong enough to express the agony that I feel when I think of those dear friends, and stretch out my arms to them across the gulf that yawns between us. You read me a description of the ghosts in the dark under-world one day, before you had grown too weary of me to let me share your thoughts. I feel like those ghosts, H. ‘Why should I tire you with a long letter? I leave you free to find happiness with the lady whose name even I do not know. ‘Perhaps some day, when you are growing old, and have become weary of all the pleasures upon earth, you will think a little more tenderly of her who thought it a small thing to peril her soul in the hope of giving you happiness, and who awoke from her fond, foolish dream, to find, with anguish unspeakable, that the sacrifice had been as vain as it was wicked.’