One day it chanced that a mule I was riding stumbled over a piece of timber and threw me, somewhat injuring my right leg, so that I had to lay up for a little while. I urged my dear one not to let my enforced imprisonment--which I was assured would only be of a few days’ duration--prevent her from taking her accustomed exercise. She said that she should remain by my side; but, oh, poor blind being that I was, the fiend prompted me to insist that she should go out and enjoy herself. It was not the custom of the country for ladies to go out alone, but in Juliette’s case the circumstances were somewhat different. Firstly, her father, who had travelled a good deal, had brought her up more in the English fashion, and she was accorded vastly more liberty than is generally accorded to Brazilian girls. And secondly, she had proved herself so useful in the orchid branch of her father’s business that he had allowed her to do much as she liked; and she had on more than one occasion gone out with some of the hunters into the very depths of the virgin forests, braving all the terrible dangers incidental to the pursuit of the blooms, and braving the hardships inseparable from it. In many ways Juliette was a wonderful woman. She was as clever as she was beautiful, and I who pen these lines declare solemnly that she was without a fault. Of course you will say I speak with a lover’s enthusiasm. Very well, let it be so. But I think of her, and I see her, as an angel of God, with the golden light of heaven upon her wings. In the first hours of my awful sorrow, when my heart was rent in twain and my poor brain was bursting, I think I cursed God, and called impiously upon Heaven to justify the act which plunged me suddenly from the happiest man on earth to the depths of a blank, maddening, damnable despair. But Heaven was silent, and God in His infinite wisdom let me suffer until the awful revelation was made to me which I shall presently record. Then I bowed my head and prayed to Him to smite me. But I lived. And it is only now, when long years have passed, and I draw nearer and nearer to the hour when I shall take my departure to my love, who waits for me with outstretched arms on heaven’s frontiers, that I am able to write calmly and think calmly. In this necessarily brief record I have shown no disposition to moralise; but I would venture to observe here that some lives are mysteries from their beginning to their end. The majority of people perhaps lead common, humdrum, vulgar, unemotional lives. And they die, never having known what it is to live; but few I fancy could be found who will venture to deny that in the words of the great English poet, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.’ We are after all but poor weak things, with but a limited vision, and to few only is it given to pierce the veil that screens us from Sheol. But to return to the thread of my story.