Her first horror at his brutality faded before her fear for his health. "Without hat! Without cloak! Good heavens!" she cried. Seizing them, she rushed after him--she, the countess, pursued the music-teacher like a valet! A servant followed her, and took the things from her hand to give to Beethoven, while she unseen returned; her mother rebuked her and ordered her to her room. But the lessons continued, and in Thérèse's diary Beethoven appeared constantly as "mon maître," "mon maître chéri." She was doomed to a long jealousy. She saw Beethoven fall in love with her cousin Giulietta Guicciardi. Giulietta came to her for advice, saying that she longed to throw over Count Gallenberg for "that beautiful horrible Beethoven--if it were not such a come-down." She did not condescend, as we have seen, and lived to regret it bitterly. The idolatry of the pupil finally seized the teacher. Beethoven came to dote upon the large heart, the pure soul, and the serene mind of Thérèse. One night, as he extemporised as only he could, he sang a song of love to her. One day he said, suddenly: "I have been like a foolish boy who gathered stones and did not observe the flower growing by the way." It was in the spring of 1806 that they became engaged. Only her brother Franz, who revered Beethoven, was in the secret. They dared not tell Thérèse's mother, but Beethoven took up life and art with a new and thorough zest. Of course, being Beethoven, he waxed wroth often at the delay and the secrecy. But the sun broke through again. For four years of his life the engagement endured. Beethoven, it seems, at last grew furious. He quarrelled with Franz, and in 1810 one day in a frenzy snapped the bond with Thérèse. As she herself told Fräulein Tenger, "The word that parted us was not spoken by me, but by him. I was terribly frightened, turned deadly pale, and trembled." Even after this, the demon in him might have been exorcised, but Thérèse had grown afraid of the lightnings of his wrath, and fear outweighed love in the girl's heart. Sometimes she felt ashamed, in later years, of her timidity; at other times she was glad that she had not hampered his art, as any wife must have done. But now she returned him his letters. He destroyed them all, evidently, except the famous letter to his "immortal beloved," which he had written in July, 1806, soon after the betrothal; and with it he kept a portrait she had given him. As for Thérèse, she, too, had kept a copy of this letter, and as she told Fräulein Tenger: "I have read it so often that I know it by heart--like a poem--and was it not a beautiful poem? I can only humbly say to myself, 'That man loved thee,' and thank God for it." She also showed a sheet of old paper, with a spray of immortelles, and on it an inscription from Ludwig: "L'immortelle à son Immortelle. LUIGI." These immortelles she sewed into a white silk cushion, with a request that it be placed under her head in her coffin.