He had seen Hermione for the last time (as he hoped) upon a Wednesday towards the end of term. A natural reticence had forbidden him to break it to her that they would not meet again; he had affected in every recent visit an increasing carelessness of demeanour, and had attempted to drag out this final interview to so dull and purposeless a conclusion as might properly let die a wearisome attachment. He neglected in nothing those artifices by which a man of refinement and honour softens the pain he may be compelled to inflict. I record it with the utmost pleasure of my old friend’s son, that he showed such true delicacy in the crisis of this lamentable story. But her woman’s instinct, aided perhaps by a more general acquaintance with such matters, forbade Hermione to be deceived. Her tenderness increased with every conversation, until, in this last, it became a kind of assiduity whose tone repelled the young man, and lent him, if possible, a yet stronger determination to be free; with her protestations of affection, her enquiries and her detailed reminiscence, was commingled a perpetual record of his cherished letters, of their place in her heart, and of how they seemed to keep him with her always. He recalled them as she spoke. He could find nothing in them to warrant so extravagant a devotion. There were many recent notes excusing his absence, many earlier ones of appointment; he remembered not a few written from abroad, longer letters full of description. They reflected, of course, his regard; but he could not understand the large part they had played in her simple life, nor why they formed in these days the staple of her fond and persistent memories. He was troubled and returned on the morrow. The letters loomed larger than ever across the sunset of their loves. On the Friday (for in his anxiety he came daily) her conversation was of nothing else, and when he showed plainly how insignificant he thought them, she offered to read him the passages that had most comforted her. She whispered their purport and drew closer to him as she told it. Then indeed this topic, which had at first only wearied and annoyed, grew to alarm him. He dared not withdraw. He came again and again: on the Saturday, the Sunday, the Monday; he no longer avoided the mention of these documents, or turned her away with careless replies. On the contrary, they seemed suddenly—by I know not what morbid possession of his delicate mind—to be of even greater moment to himself than to her. He would have touched them, held them, borne them away with him. She only refused, with a look of possession and pride in her eyes. Tuesday and Wednesday offered no solution, Thursday was dangerous, and Friday sombre.