"Dear Hermia, I now write to offer you your freedom. My feelings towards you have in no wise changed. I still love you as much as ever I did, but I feel that it would be unfair towards you to keep you longer under the bond of an engagement which I see no present prospect of being able to bring to its legitimate conclusion. In brief, I am too poor to marry, and am likely to remain so for an indefinite period. Rather would I keep single forever than allow my wife to deteriorate into one of those household drudges of which we can see so many specimens around us. That sort of thing I could not reconcile either to my conscience or my feelings; neither am I selfish enough to wish you to wear out the best years of your life in waiting for one who, the longer he lives, the more unworthy he feels himself to be of the great treasure of your love. "I do not know that I can add more, unless it be to say that, should I ever find myself in a position to marry, you would be the one whom I should choose before all the world; and also that my heart still clings to you, and that, in writing as I am now, I feel that I am cutting myself adrift from all that has been brightest and best in my life. "Always, dear Hermia, yours most sincerely, "Frank Derison." This characteristic epistle elicited the following reply: "Dear Frank, "The contents of your letter caused me very little surprise, and what I did experience was of a pleasurable kind. For some time past it has been plain to me that the tie which bound us, slight though it was, had become irksome to you, and that its severance would be hailed by you as a relief. To me, almost from the first, it has been as a chain that galled and fretted me; and your having written me as you have, has merely anticipated by a few days a step which I had fully made up my mind to take on my own account. "To be candid with you--and surely in such a matter candor is of the first importance--my feelings towards you were never of a kind to warrant me in entering into any engagement with you, nor do I believe that time would do anything towards effecting a change in them. A year ago I was led away by your impassioned words, and by a certain amount of self-deception on my own part, into believing that I might, after a while, come to care for you in the way you wanted me to do. But I was not long in finding out that I had made a great mistake; and now you on your side have made a similar discovery. Let us hope that, taught by experience, both of us will be wiser in time to come. "Always your friend and well-wisher, "Hermia Rivers."