"Spring will soon be here, but I feel that I shall not live to see it, so I will write to you now when I have strength. I do so partly for my own sake, but far more for yours. For my sake, that you may not despise me after I am dead, and for yours, that you may no longer have the pain of feeling that the woman you loved was unworthy of you. "I lied in that letter which I wrote to you four years ago. I loved you then, love you now, and shall love you till I die. And if God grants that we are the same in heaven as on earth, I shall love you even after death. And it was because I loved you that I parted from you. "Do not shake your head in despair at these strange words. "Happiness that I had purchased at the expense of my father's curse and my mother's despair would not have been pure and unsullied. But I should have lived that down. "_One_ thing alone I could not have got over--you smiled at me for saying so long ago, and yet I was right: my ignorance unfitted me for the position your wife would have to hold. "I had lived too long, in a little provincial town, a gray, still life passed in utter ignorance of the world and its ways; I could not have borne an active life and the full light of day. I should not have been able rightly to understand you either in sorrow or in joy, and that would have been terrible to me, and perhaps even more terrible to you. I should never have been at my ease with your friends or their wives; they would have laughed at my manners and mode of speaking, and I should have been hurt and you also. You would then perhaps have kept me shut out from society, and I could not have borne that. The thought that my husband was ashamed of me would have been agony to me--as well as to you. And so the time would have surely come of which I once warned you: you would have cursed the hour when I became your wife. You would not have separated from me--I know that. But we should have been unhappy, and you, perhaps, would have been even more unhappy than I. "I saw all this clearly, and I loved you so dearly that I did not want you to be made miserable through me. So I determined that the sorrow should all be mine--told my parents that I would marry Chaim, and wrote that letter to you. "Though I lied to you, I told Chaim the whole truth. I told him my story, and said that I could only be his faithful servant and helper. He answered that time would put all right. I knew that it would have no effect, but I had taken up my burden and would bear it. "It was right, and I do not complain.