all, hear me as if I were lying on your breast, weeping there all my tears. Hear and understand as sometimes you have heard and understood. Do you remember Christmas morning? I was crying, and I fancied I saw your eyes clouded too: it was at that moment I realised that I loved you above everything in all the world, and I decided then to make some sacrifice for you. This is the sacrifice; to leave you for a while in the endeavour to get cured and to come back to you restored and content. Then in my little home I will live for you; and I will work; yes, I also will bring my stone to the edifice of our future well-being. We are young, still too young; we can do a great deal if we really wish it. Neither of us have any doubts of the other; you are sure of me; I also am sure of you. I know how you love me, and that you love me just because I am what I am. "Listen; after two or three weeks you shall come to my mother's as we have arranged. You must pretend to find me still so unwell that you decide to leave me till I am better. Then you shall return to Rome and live thinking of me. You shall study, compete for some better post. The months will pass, we will write to each other every day, we will economise--or, what is better, accumulate treasures--of love and of money. Our position will improve, and when we come together again we shall begin a new honeymoon, very different from the first, and it shall last for the whole of our life." Having reached this point in her letter, Regina felt quite frozen up, as if a blast of icy wind had struck her shoulders. This she was writing--was it not all illusion? all a lie? Words! Words! Who could know how the future would be made? The word _made_ came spontaneously into her thought, and she was struck by it. Who makes the future? No one. We make it ourselves by our present. "I shall make my future with this letter, only not even I can know what future I shall make." Regina felt afraid of this obscure work; then suddenly she cheered, remembering that all she had written in the letter was really there in her heart. Illusion it might be, but for her it was truth. Then, come what might, why should she be afraid? Life is for those who have the courage to carry out their own ideas! It seemed needless to prolong the letter. She had already said too many useless things, perhaps without succeeding in the expression of what was really whirling in her soul. She rapidly set down a few concluding lines.