In connection with the opening phrase, we must recognise in it the confirmation of an assertion made in my article in the _Woman at Home_ published twenty years before these Letters were published, but which had for its authority the information given me by Dr. Paul Heger upon the occasion of a conversation, when he very kindly talked over with me the questions connected with events in his parents' life that, inasmuch as they happened before his birth, he knew as family traditions chiefly--but still as traditions derived from the only authentic sources of information that exist: Dr. Paul Heger's theory was that until Charlotte had left Bruxelles and commenced to write to his father letters in a tone of exaltation that announced an exaggerated attachment, Monsieur Heger himself had never suspected the existence of any such sentiment; and that he, and Madame Heger (?)--were disposed to regard it as an attack of morbid regret for the more animated life she had led in Bruxelles, and the dulness of her home surroundings. And that, acting upon this supposition, they had thought it advisable (and this in Charlotte's own interests chiefly) to let her know that they were both of them distressed and displeased by the tone of her letters; and that if she wished to keep up the correspondence, she must become more reasonable and temperate in her way of expressing herself; and that, as the exchange of letters between busy people became onerous, there must be only two letters every year at intervals of six months. We find Charlotte acknowledging this condition, as one that she had accepted, but that she complained of as a great 'privation': and she then goes on to explain (as only one taught by romantic, that is to say by unselfish, and unsensual, love, that 'does not seek its own,' could explain it) in what this 'privation' consists. Did any woman, neglected by the man she loves, ever discover a device, at once so passionate, and so poetically pure as Charlotte's, who makes the man who does not love her, but whom she knows is an adoring father, try to realise what she feels, so far away from him, and left without tidings _by asking him to picture what he would feel if separated by a hundred and sixty leagues from his little child, he were left without news of him?_ But now if we consult honestly our own impressions, does this letter reveal that '_it is no cause of grief to Charlotte that M. Heger is married_'? Is it true that _there 'is nothing in it that any enthusiastic woman might not write to a married man with a family who had been her teacher_'? What the letter does reveal (thus it seems to me at least) is one supreme thing before all others: that the writer of it is past saving, by this time, from the destiny she prophesied for herself ten months ago in Bruxelles. '_My heart will break_,' Charlotte said then: when fate (in the garb of Madame Heger) thrust herself between her and her beloved Professor.