And now, touching and eloquent as it all is, what escape is there from the conclusion that the writer of this letter _must_ break her heart? What else can happen? Let us recognise her plight. Here one has an entirely honourable, passionately tender, tenderly passionate, very serious woman, her mind dominated (as she says herself) by one tyrannical fixed idea; let us rather say by one tragical passion; and who sees her own life, and her claims upon the man she loves through the medium of this tragical passion: _and who gives her life an impossible purpose; and who makes impossible claims_. They are very small claims, she pleads. And so they are, very small in comparison with what she gives, her whole life's devotion poured out at the feet of her 'Master,' from whom she only asks in return that he will not forbid her worship; that, now and again, he will give her the joy of seeing his handwriting, and of knowing that he is well. But small as these claims are, they are unreasonable:--'_to the last degree "inconvenient" and impossible_,' as Madame would have said,--in the particular case of this 'Master'; a married man and an attached husband with five children, the Director of a Pensionnat de Jeunes Filles who has need to be especially circumspect; and who cannot discreetly, nor even honourably, allow a former under-mistress to address him passionate, romantic love-letters, even every six months. Nor can this loyal husband and self-respecting Catholic and Professor undertake to appear to sanction this indiscretion, by keeping her informed of his health and welfare at regular intervals. So that, building her heart's desires upon false hopes, that, from day to day, wear themselves out in disappointment, and looking for consolation to things necessarily withdrawn; and that she pursues in vain like 'fading visions,'--how is our poor Charlotte to find any escape from the heart-break that is the natural term of the path along which this Love, that has become her destiny, leads her? No way of escape is there for Charlotte: not in heaven above, nor on the earth beneath, nor in the waters under the earth. For no miracle can give her love a happy ending; say that even a thunderbolt fell from heaven to remove Madame Heger,--it would be extremely unjust--but admit that a murderous miracle be granted--even so, it would not alter the fact that M. Heger is not in love with Charlotte. And no earthly scheme either can bridge the separation--wider than the 160 leagues between Yorkshire and Brussels--that now severs Charlotte, breaking her heart in Yorkshire, from her Master in literature, carrying on, as stormily and triumphantly as when she assisted at them, his lessons in the class-rooms in the Rue d'Isabelle: those memory-haunted class-rooms she will never see again; because although we find her in these Letters speaking of projects of earning money that she may return to Bruxelles, if only to see her professor once again, one knows that there would be