(Enclosed with the foregoing) DEAR SIR: My daughter has read your letter (I have not) and asked me to return it to you, together with those you had previously sent her. Let me assure you, sir, that it is only after much earnest prayer that I have dared to step in where my daughter's happiness was concerned and have commanded her to cease from this correspondence. I trust I may retain your respect and esteem. Faithfully yours, EZRA DOANE. XLIV EXTRACT FROM PHILIP'S DIARY I have been looking over her letters and mine, steeping my soul in the bitterness of its destiny; and what has impressed me most is a note of anxiety in them from the first, "some consequence yet hanging in the stars," which gave warning of their futile issue. As I read them one after another, the feeling that they were mine, a real part of my life, written to me and by me, became inexplicably remote. I could not assure myself that they were anything more than some broken memory of "old, unhappy, far-off things," a single, sobbing note of love's tragic song that has been singing in the world from the beginning. Our tale has been made one with the ancient theme of the poets. I ask myself why love, the one sweet reality of life, should have been turned for men into the well-spring of sorrows--for out of it, in one way or another, whether through gratification or disappointment, sorrow does inevitably flow. Has some jealous power of fate or the gods willed that man shall live in eternal deceptions, and so fenced about with cares and dumb griefs and many madnesses this great reality and dispeller of illusion?