Still would I write to you, beloved sister who have left me! Oh! can this be possible? You, my Guardian Angel! It is in heaven that I now look for you, that I now behold you—in heaven, your true home—in heaven, where you have found again our mother. O my God! my God! Always shall I remember this last journey, of which you were the object; the anguish on the way, the haste to arrive, the chill that fell on my heart at the gate of the convent. Oh! you knew that I could not bear to see you suffer; and then, perhaps, you might think you would recover, for I cannot believe that you desired to die.... Ah! to see you dying; to embrace you, watch by you, hear the last effusions of that tenderness to which my mother had bequeathed me; to see this flame, which was my life, die out, and yet not die myself—Kate, Kate, I can think only, speak only, of you! I have been very ill. I feel weak, very weak—almost discouraged to live. Tell me that you are not gone away; soul of my sister, speak to my soul! Oh! how it seems to me as if I had lost everything. You it was who gave so great an interest to my life, animating everything with your affection. And now.... FEBRUARY 28. Dear Kate, obtain strength for me. I desire to live for René. Why did you not stay with us, my beloved? I have bitter regrets.... I should have wished to nurse you, to keep you here. O foolishness of love! what right have I to wish to keep you from your own country? Dear sister, the correspondence which was my daily delight must not end: I will write my journal for _you_. God, who is so good, even when he separates two hearts which were one, could not refuse anything to his elect. Ask him, then, my sister, that you may every day come to me, if even only for an instant. Oh! would that I could see you. It seems to me that with you all died; that nothing more will ever in this world smile on me, that the eternal mourning of my soul can never more be comforted. Our friends write to me. Margaret and Marcella weep with me. My mother, Adrien, Gertrude, and René are full of unspeakable tenderness and solicitude towards me; and yet I have scarcely any response to make them but my tears. All is night around me: the Sun has set. Oh! speak to me, Kate—only one word, one vibration of your dear voice, one of your smiles. Is it true, my God, that for twenty-five days past this face so dearly loved has been covered with a shroud? Is it true? Has death indeed come between us? Had we not enough of absence and of separation, that other mourning of the soul? I still hear her last word.... Oh! who will give me back my past joys, fled away, and the affection which enfolded all?