“Constance--As I write that word how many remembrances rush upon me!--for how many years has that name been a talisman to my heart, waking its emotions at will! You are the first woman I ever really loved: you rejected me, yet I could not disdain you. You became another’s but my love could not desert you. Your hand wrote the history of my life after the period when we met,--my habits--my thoughts--you influenced and coloured them all! And now, Constance, you are free; and I love you more fervently than ever! And you--yes, you would not reject me now; you have grown wiser, and learned the value of a heart. And yet the same Fate that divided us hitherto will divide us now; all obstacles but one are passed away--of that one you shall hear and judge. “When we parted, Constance, years ago, I did not submit tamely to the burning remembrance you bequeathed me; I sought to dissipate your image, and by wooing others to forget yourself. Need I say, that to know another was only to remember you the more? But among the other and far less worthy objects of my pursuit was one whom, had I not seen you first, I might have loved as ardently as I do you; and in the first flush of emotion, and the heat of sudden events, I imagined that I did so love her. She was an orphan, a child in years and in the world; and I was all to her--I am, all to her. She is not mine by the ties of the Church; but I have pledged a faith to her equally sacred and as strong. Shall I break that faith? shall I betray that trust? shall I crush a heart that has always been mine--mine more tenderly than yours, rich in a thousand gifts and resources, ever was or ever can be? Shall I,--sworn to protect her--I, who have already robbed her of fame and friends, rob her now of father, brother, lover, husband, the world itself,--for I am all to her? Never--never! I shall be wretched throughout life: I shall know that you are free that you--oh! Constance! you might be mine!--but she shall never dream what she has cost me! I have been too cold, too ungrateful to her already--I will make her amends. My heart may break in the effort, but it shall reward her. You, Constance, in the pride of your lofty station, your strengthened mind, your regulated virtue (fenced in by the hundred barriers of custom), you cannot, perhaps, conceive how pure and devoted the soul of this poor girl is! She is not one whom I could heap riches upon and leave:--my love is all the riches she knows. Earth has not a consolation or a recompense for the loss of my affection: and even Heaven itself she has never learned to think of, except as a place in which we shall be united for ever. As I write this I know that she is sitting afar off and alone, and thinking only of one whose whole soul, fated and accursed as he is, is maddened by the love of another. My letters, her only comfort, have been cold and few of late; I know how they have wrung her heart. I picture to myself her