Ah! it was all one! And yet amidst her grief the thought of being able to feel all this to the core as _he_ had felt, was like the sun shining behind a misty atmosphere and gradually bursting through the layers of fog with thousands of undreamed-of light effects, above and below. How freely she could breathe again after the void, privation, brooding of many years. Not until later did individual thoughts force themselves forward, then not fully until Rönnaug came to her. There was something labored in this letter; it read occasionally like a translation from a foreign language. But now for the _letter itself_:-- I have just returned from the south. I thought myself strong enough. Alas! The papers have doubtless informed you that I am ill; but the papers do not know what I now know! The first thing I do in this new certainty is to write to you, dear Magnhild. You will, of course, be painfully surprised at the sight of my signature. I awakened great hopes--and failed when they should have been fulfilled. A thousand times since I have thought how impossible it would be for you to go to the piano and try over some song we three had studied together, or some exercise we two had gone through. A miracle would have been needed to compel you to do so. A thousand times I have considered whether I should write to you, and tell you what I must now tell you, that this has been the deepest sorrow of my life. You set me free from a once rich, but afterward unworthy relation, and this was my salvation. The germ of innocence in my soul was once more released. The entire extent of my emancipation, however, I did not realize so long as we were together. And I repaid you for what you had done for me by desolating your life, so far as lay within my power. But I have also yearned to tell you what I now believe: our destiny upon earth is not alone what we ourselves have recognized it to be, not alone what we believe to be the main purpose of our existences. When you, without being yourself conscious of it, gave me a purer, higher tendency, you were fulfilling a part of your destiny, dear Magnhild. It was perhaps a small part; but perhaps it was also only an hundredth part of still more which you had done for many others without so much as suspecting it yourself.