is an artist at leaving you in the lurch. The world is strewn with persons she has left in it, and out of the three inhabitants of a mountain to leave one there is surely an enormous percentage. Now what is your opinion of a woman with a healthy body, a warm room, and a sufficient dinner, who feels as though the soul within her were an echoing cavern, empty, cold, and dark? It is what I feel at this moment, and it is shameful. Isn't it shameful that the sight of leaden clouds--but they really are dreadful clouds, inky, ragged, harassed--scudding across the sky, and of furious brown beech-leaves on the little trees in front of the Lindebergs' deserted house being lashed and maddened by the wind, should make me suddenly catch my breath for pain? It is pain, quite sharp, unmistakable pain, and it is because I am alone, and my friends gone, and the dusk is falling. This afternoon I leaned against their gate and really suffered. Regret for the past, fear for the future,--vague, rather terrifying fears, not wholly unconnected with you--hurt so much that they positively succeeded in wringing a tear out of me. It was a very reluctant tear, and only came out after a world of wringing, and I had stood there a most morbid long time before it appeared; but it did appear, and the vicious wind screamed round the Lindebergs' blank house, rattled its staring naked windows, banged in wild gusts about the road where the puddles of half melted snow reflected the blackness of the sky, tore at my hair and dress, stung my cheeks, shook the gate I held on to, thundered over the hills. Dear young man, I don't want to afflict you with these tales of woe and weakness, but I must tell you what I did next. I went up and got the key from Johanna, in whose keeping Frau von Lindeberg had left it, and came down again, and unlocked the door of the house lately so full of light and life, and crept fearfully about the echoing rooms and up the dismal stairs, and let myself go, as I tell you, to a very orgy of morbidness. It was like a nightmare. Memories took the form of ghosts, and clutched at me through the balusters and from behind doors with thin cold fingers; and the happiest memories were those that clutched the coldest. I fled at last in a sudden panic, flying out of reach of them, slamming the door to, running for my life up the road and in at our gate. Johanna did not let me in at once, and I banged with my fists in a frenzy to get away from the black sky and the threatening thunder of the storm-stricken pines. '_Herr Gott_' said Johanna when she saw me; so that I must have looked rather wild.