How came it?--How have you prevailed?--Oh teach me your art to soften his power, to unloose the grasp of his authority, and I will love you as----I believe I cannot love you better than I do; for have you not cast a ray of cheering light upon my dungeon?--Have you not bestowed upon me the only charm of existence that I have known for many and many a tedious day? But why did you do so? Do you love me as I love you? You never told me so. Seven days and seven nights you lived in our castle; and you walked with me by day, you wandered with me by night. I talked to you almost without ceasing.--You spoke infinitely less than I did.--You pressed my hand as it held yours: but you never said, _I love you!--I love you, Sibella, with all my soul._--Nor did you ever quit your rest, amidst the darkness of the night, to hover near my chamber, as I have done near yours.--Yes, Miss Ashburn, when at night you had retired from me, I beheld only solitude and imprisonment; and I have waited hours in that forlorn gallery, that I might catch the whisper of your breathings, that the consciousness of being near a friend might restore me to hope, to hilarity, to confidence. Yet now I recollect it, and you do love me; for you asked the imperious, the denying Mr. Valmont, to let you take me from the castle. Oh, you did urge--you did intreat.--You do love me.--I am writing a letter to you; and perhaps, one day, I shall have all my happiness. * * * * * I wish Mr. Valmont would show me the letter you wrote to him. He has charged me to answer it, and I have been obliged to walk a great while, and to think a great deal, before I could remember a word of what he said I was to repeat to you; and now I do not think I recollect the whole. I would return to his study and ask him to tell it me again; but he has an aversion to trouble, and perhaps, irritated by my forgetfulness, might say, I should not write to you at all.--Ah, if he were to say that, Miss Ashburn, and if it were possible for me to send a letter out of the castle in defiance of his commands, do you think I would obey him?--No, no. Andrew came to me in the wood, to bid me attend my uncle in his library; and I went thither immediately. He was but just risen; and a letter, which I suppose was your letter, and which must have arrived yesterday, was laying open on the table beside him; and when he spoke to me he laid his right hand upon the letter. 'Numberless are the hours, child,' Mr. Valmont said to me soon after I entered, 'that I have employed in pondering on your welfare:--yet you are not the docile and grateful creature I expected to find you.' 'Sir,' I said, 'if in all those hours of pondering you never thought of the only means by which my welfare can be effected, am I therefore forbidden to be happy?--Am I to be unhappy, because I and not you discovered how I might be very, very happy?'