alone who will die. If you don’t come--if you write that you can do nothing for me, I shall have no word or thought of reproach for you. In bidding you good-bye, I shall try and not regret life too much, but I think that you never quite understood that the friendship you gave me is still the best thing in my life--never quite understood that what I called my friendship for you went by another name in my heart. LAURA DOUVIERS P. S. Before putting this letter in the post I shall make another attempt. This evening I shall go and see him one last time more. If you get this therefore it will mean that really.... Good-bye, good-bye! I don’t know what I am writing. Edouard had received this letter on the morning of the day he had left England. That is to say he had decided to leave as soon as he received it. In any case he had not intended to stay much longer. I don’t mean to insinuate that he would have been incapable of returning to Paris specially to help Laura; I merely say that he is glad to return. He has been kept terribly short of pleasure lately in England; and the first thing he means to do when he gets to Paris is to go to a house of ill-fame; and as he doesn’t wish to take his private papers with him, he reaches his portmanteau down from the rack and opens it, so as to slip in Laura’s letter. The place for this letter is not among coats and shirts; he pulls out from beneath the clothes a cloth-bound MS. book, half filled with his writing; turns to the very beginning of the book, looks up certain pages which were written last year and re-reads them; it is between these that Laura’s letter will find its proper place. EDOUARD’S JOURNAL _Oct. 18th._--Laura does not seem to suspect her power; but I, who can unravel the secrets of my own heart, know well enough that up till now I have never written a line that has not been indirectly inspired by her. I feel her still a child beside me, and all the skill of my discourse is due only to my constant desire to instruct, to convince, to captivate her. I see nothing--I hear nothing without asking myself what she would think of it. I forsake my own emotion to feel only hers. And I think that if she were not there to give definition to my personality, it would vanish in the excessive vagueness of its contours. It is only round her that I concentrate and define myself. By what illusion have I hitherto believed that I was fashioning her to my likeness, when, on the contrary, I was bending myself to hers? And I never noticed it! Or rather--the influence of love, by a curious action of give and take, made us both reciprocally alter our natures. Involuntarily--unconsciously--each one of a pair of lovers fashions himself to meet the other’s requirements--endeavours by a continual effort to resemble that idol of himself which he beholds in the other’s heart.... Whoever really loves abandons all sincerity.