Rosette acted her part with a melancholy and caressing grace, a sorrowful, resigned tone that went to the heart;--and when Rosalind said to her: "I would love you, if I could," the tears were ready to overflow, and she could hardly hold them back, for Phœbe's story is her own, as Orlando's is mine, with this difference, that everything turns out happily for Orlando, and that Phœbe, disappointed in her love, is compelled to marry Sylvius instead of the charming ideal she longed to embrace. Such is life: that which affords happiness to one necessarily causes another unhappiness. It is very fortunate for me that Théodore is a woman, it is very unfortunate for Rosette that he is not a man, and she is now wallowing in the slough of amorous impossibilities in which I recently went astray. At the end of the play Rosalind lays aside the doublet of the page Ganymede for the garments of her own sex, is recognized by her father as his daughter, by Orlando as his mistress: the god Hymen arrives with his saffron-colored livery and his legitimate torches.--Three weddings take place.--Orlando marries Rosalind, Phœbe Sylvius, and the clown Touchstone the artless Audrey.--Then the epilogue has its say and the curtain falls. All this has interested us exceedingly and engrossed our minds; there was, in a certain sense, a play within the play, a drama invisible to the other spectators and unsuspected by them, which we played for ourselves alone, and which, in symbolic phrases, summed up our whole lives and expressed our most secret desires.--Except for Rosalind's strange prescription I should be sicker than ever, having not even a distant hope of cure, and I should have continued to wander sadly through the winding paths of the dark forest. And yet I have only a moral certainty; I lack proofs and I can remain no longer in this state of uncertainty; I absolutely must speak to Théodore in more definite terms. I have approached him twenty times with a sentence ready on my lips, but have not succeeded in saying it to him--I dare not; I have many opportunities to speak to him alone, either in the park or in my room, or in his, for he comes to see me and I go to see him, but I let them pass without profiting by them, although the next moment I feel a mortal regret and fly into a terrible rage with myself. I open my mouth, and in spite of all I can do, other words take the places of the words I intended to say; instead of declaring my love, I discourse upon the rain, the fine weather or some other similarly stupid subject. And the season is drawing to a close and soon we shall return to the town; the facilities which present themselves according to my wishes here will be renewed nowhere else:--perhaps we shall lose sight of each other and opposite currents will carry us in opposite directions, I doubt not.