am poor and once was ambitious; that I earned my bread, as governess and intermittent literary hack, until a year ago, when a tiny fortune was left me by a relative whom the immortals loved not, since he lived so long; that I have written three novels, moderately successful, and am burning to find out whether I can write a play; and, last of all, that my aunt invited me down here to spend this summer in what she calls communion with nature. There! the chapter is closed. Be egotistical, you; but suffer me to talk about things seen and heard, not of those pertaining to the particle Me. Tell me everything you will, and without restraint. I may not criticise your style, though I shall watch to see it develop into something fine. [Sidenote: _Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose_] Your letter! no, mine, as nothing has ever been mine since I was born, for it was conceived for me and moulded for my eyes only. The words you have said to me, even in those long hours on the lake, under the rose of sunset, are tantalizingly lost, though I try to recall them as I lie at night looking at the sky from my bed; I know their sense, their sound, yet something sweetly personal is gone, like a fragrance escaped. This is mine: transcript of your beautiful soul upon a page less white. But though we talk all day on the lake and half the night by camp-fires under the moon, what can I say to you on this cold paper and with this dull pen? Ah, but the thoughts I send you! The winged invisible messengers that go speeding between us in those silent hours when my father sleeps, and I lie in my tent watching the solemn top of the great pine, and over it the stars! Those messages will never be told; earth has no speech for them. They are beyond the scope of music. Yet there must be speech for them somewhere. They are like the overtones we cannot hear unless our ears are delicately attuned; and if you, in your tent, were lying in an ecstasy of waiting for them as I in a rapture of sending, then would you not hear? But the thought is too great, too terrible. That would be as if we were gods, to taste no more of earthly chills and languors. Do you know what has happened to me since I saw you first? I have grown blind to the rest of this little world. My father's voice sounds far-off and hollow; even his face is strange, as if half hidden by a mist. I do not see the others at your camp, even though they and all their ways ought to be deliciously new to me, like another language. Only when some one touches your hand, or gives you a flower, or treats you familiarly! Then a sudden passion of hatred for the whole world shakes me to the centre, and I long to seize you in my arms, and speed away with you, along the lake and over the hills. I am, in my own eyes, what I have always supposed savages to be; perhaps I am a savage. But there is one agony you might spare me: the story of your life before you came here. Twenty wasted years, and I did