"Oh, Rix, there seems to be so many misunderstandings in this exceedingly small world of ours--rows innumerable, heartburns, recriminations, quarrels secret and open, and endless misunderstandings. "Please don't let any come between us, will you? Somehow, lately, I find myself looking on you as a distant but solid and almost peaceful refuge for my harried thoughts. And I'm so very, very tired of being hunted. "STRELSA." "If they hunt you too hard," he wrote to Strelsa, "the gateway of my friendship is open to you always: remember that, now and in the days to come. "What you have written leaves me with nothing to answer except this. To all it is given to endure according to their strength; beyond it no one can strive; but short of its limits it's a shame to show faint-heartedness. "About the man you are determined to marry I have no further word to say. You know in what repute he is held in your world, and you believe that its censure is unjust. There is good in every man, perhaps, and perhaps the good in this man may show itself only in response to the better qualities in you. "Somehow, without trying, you almost instantly evoke the better qualities in me. You changed my entire life; do you know it? I myself scarcely comprehended why. Perhaps the negative sweetness in you concentrated and brought out the positive strength so long dormant in me. All I know clearly is that you came into my life and found a fool wasting it, capering about in a costume half livery, half motley. My ambition was limited to my cap and bells; my aspirations never reached beyond the tip of my bauble. Then I saw you--and, all by themselves, my rags of motley fell from me, and something resembling a man stepped clear of them. "I am trying to make out of myself all that there is in me to develop. It is not much--scarcely more than the ability to earn a living. "I have come to care for nothing more than the right to look this sunny world straight in the face. Until I knew you I had scarcely seen it except through artificial light--scarce heard its voice; for the laughter of your world and the jingle of my cap and bells drowned it in my ass's ears. "I could tell you--for in dark moments I often believe it--that there is only one thing that counts in the world--one thing worth having, worth giving--love! "But in my heart I know it is not so; and the romancers are mistaken; and so is the heart denied. "Better and worth more than love of man or woman is the mind's silent approval--whether given in tranquillity or accorded in dumb anguish.