"We parted so strangely, yesterday. Under the first shock of the blow I ran away as if I had been blind and mad. As if one could escape the mockery of hell in one's own breast! When I realized this, I turned back. I should have been glad to have surrendered myself to you--unconditionally--that very night. But you had already ridden away, and the others had chosen to leave the house and hurry off by the night train. Thus I am left here undisturbed, to come to my senses, and to write you a long letter--to which I can expect no answer. "After all, what could you say to me? For we are parted again--we are separated, after all. And the case is so terribly clear, that it makes all explanation and discussion superfluous. Why, then, should I waste so much paper? and even go out of my way to give an explanation at which one scarcely knows whether he ought to laugh or weep? "But I owe it to you--no, not to you; for, at bottom, I did not sin against you but against myself; and my confession, about which you will perhaps care little, is merely a relief to that self, which I hope you will grant me for the sake of our old friendship. I will try to be as brief as possible. "You know how, just before my father died, I was sent to a watering-place; and how I twice passed through the city where you lived--the first time on my journey there, by way of Holland, where I had business to attend to; and then again on my return, when I was spurred on to the wildest haste by the news from home, and wanted to spare us both a mere shake of the hand between the steamer and the railroad, while in such a mood. In the interval between these two visits, you had married and become a father. I looked forward to becoming acquainted with your wife and child, but for that very reason I put off our meeting until a brighter time, and passed through Hamburg without suspecting---- "Still, in spite of all my anxiety as to how I should find my father, a painful recollection followed me. You know I had never been very straitlaced in my way of life or my adventures, and scarcely ever had paid for this frivolity even with remorse. I was always conscientious toward the conscientious, and unscrupulous toward the unscrupulous. I had never consciously or deliberately tried to disturb the peace of a single soul, and was above the level of the conventional _bonnes fortunes_ one meets in his every-day path. "But, not to make myself out better than I was, certain temptations were always powerful with me simply because of their adventurousness; and a decidedly insignificant Juliet might have seduced me into playing the Romeo, if the rope-ladder to her balcony had been a particularly breakneck one.