He touched her cheek lightly. She raised her face toward him, quietly and submissively, and looked at him half inquiringly, half afraid. Her lips, with their white teeth, were parted--yet now without a laugh--and her hands lay quietly folded in her lap. Yet, as he bent over her, he only touched the hair upon her forehead lightly with his lips. "Good-night!" he said again. Then he went into the adjoining room, and closed the door behind him. CHAPTER XI. At the foot of his bed stood a cabinet in which he preserved all kinds of relics, diaries, letters--mementos of his lost love. He thrust in his hand at random, and drew out a portfolio containing all Irene's letters, from the first unimportant notes, in which she sent him some communication from her uncle--her uncle had an aversion to pen and ink, and was very glad to make use of his niece as a secretary--to the sheets on which the fate of his life stood written. He lit a lamp and spread out before him this chronicle of the happiest years of his youth. Thus he sat with his back to the door of the sitting-room, now reading, and now mechanically taking up one sheet after the other. What could they tell him that was new? And yet these fine, slender letters reminded him of the hand that had written them. He had never seen any other hand that had expressed so much character, so much delicacy and firmness, so much flexibility and noble repose. He had often teased Irene about this, by telling her that he would undertake to decide from the appearance of her hands whether she was glad or sad, laughing or crying. The handwriting, too, was a very correct expression of her impulsive and self-controlled inner nature. Now, as he picked out here and there some particular sheet and glanced over it again, the whole past rose up so vividly before him that he felt as if he must suffocate in the close, lonely, sad atmosphere that surrounded him; as if he were lying in his grave, and a voice arose from these pages and repeated to him the history of his own life, that now lay ruined and shattered for ever more.