As it’s utterly beyond me to thank you enough for your letter, I’ll try a little grumbling instead. Is it not rather cruel to say that I must not write more than once a week? Once a week for a month means only four letters in all. Sha’n’t we be almost as much strangers when you come back as when you went away? When you come back! The words make my blood, run faster. They’re like the refrain of a song. When you come back! They’re the music I shall march by, and live my life by, till you come. I enter into all you say about giving you a quiet month to think and to decide. I understand, and I admire it. And yet it’s almost more than I can stand. To know where you are, to have the power to join you in a few hours, and yet to be forced to serve a month’s imprisonment in England, is well-nigh too much for flesh and blood. As I laid down your letter this morning, I realized that by riding hard across Ruddington Heath I could have caught you for a moment at the station. But I set your sovereign command before my eyes ... and stayed at home! Ought you not to be very nice to me for being so good and obedient? For example, don’t I deserve a long letter on Tuesday? Till you come back, and for ever, RUDDINGTON. P.S.--Do not be angry with me for what I am going to say. Although I put it in a postscript, it is uppermost in my thoughts. Pray don’t think I’m about to try and coax you out of your month’s reflection. Long and hard though I shall find it, I say. Have the month by all means. But is it necessary that you should pass the month in your present conditions? It tortures me to know that while I will live this month in comfort and leisure, you will often find it difficult even to snatch the time for one weekly letter. Now that I know that no one else has won you, take my word for it, dearest, that no one else ever shall! Susan is going to be _my_ Susan, even if I’ve to take her by storm. What follows? This. From the moment of reading your letter, I promoted myself to be your protector to our lives’ end. How then can I tolerate you remaining for another hour in a servile position for which you were never born--into which some hateful freak of Fate has thrust you, and out of which it is the greatest honour of my life to rescue you? It maddens me that, perhaps at this very moment, you are being ordered about, and made to fetch and carry for somebody who isn’t fit to lace your shoes. Reading this, you can easily be angry. But bear with me. There are so many ways in which a thing like this could be arranged without unseemliness. And, surely, nothing can be more unfitting than that you should be distracted from so solemn a decision by a fussy pressure of petty tasks. I entreat you to give me the great happiness of setting you free. R.