"I am quite quiet now, Felix, or at least as quiet as one is when pain has exhausted all one's strength. I write to you this very night, for of course there can be no thought of sleep. I have again and again thought it all over from the beginning, and have each time arrived at the same conclusion--that I deceived myself in believing through all these years that I was necessary to your happiness. Do not try to shake this belief; I am sadly humbled, Felix, very wretched and miserable because of this confession; but I am as sure that it is true, as I am that I still live and breathe. "I know that you still love me, perhaps quite as much as you have always loved me. But one thing I did not know before, and I learn it now with pain: you love something better than you do me--your freedom. "You would be willing to sacrifice it, partly from chivalry, in order that you might keep your promise; partly from kind-heartedness, for you must feel how my whole life has hung on you, and how slowly these wounds will heal. And yet, _it must be!_ How could anything that would not make you perfectly happy ever be happiness to me? "You shall be free again, and you may be so without any anxiety about me. I have more strength than I seem to have. There is only one thing I cannot bear: to see a sacrifice laid at my feet. "Even if you were now willing to disclose your secret to me, it would not alter my resolve. I would not have you think that I wanted to wring anything from you, which you would not give to me of your own accord. But that you should make a distinction between that which you share with me, and that which belongs only to yourself ... it may seem narrow-minded or weak or arrogant of me, but I cannot help myself, I cannot rise above it. "I shall never feel toward you, Felix, any differently from what I do now; I shall never feel toward another as I do toward you. I have to thank you for the best and dearest feelings that I have ever possessed and experienced. No lapse of time can change this in the least--as little as it can my resolve. "Think kindly of me, too--without bitterness. And now farewell!--farewell forever! Irene."