"Strelsa dear, I shall always care for you; but I have discovered that love is another matter--higher or lower as you will--but different. And I do not think I shall be able to love the girl who does what you are decided to do. And that does not mean that I criticise you or blame you, or that my sympathy, affection, interest, in you will be less. On the contrary all these emotions may become keener; only one little part will die out, and that without changing the rest--merely that mysterious, curious, elusive and illogical atom in the unstable molecule, which we call love--and which, when separated, leaves the molecule changed only in name. We call it friendship, then. "And this is, I think, what you would most desire. So when you do what you have determined to do, I will really become toward you what you are--and have always been--toward me. And could either of us ask for more? "Only--forgive me--I wish it had been Sir Charles--or almost any other man. But that is for your decision. Strelsa governs and alone is responsible to Strelsa. "Meanwhile do not doubt my affection--do not fear unkindness, judgment, or criticism. I wish I were what you cared for most in the world--after the approval of your own mind. I wish you cared for me not only as you do but with all that has never been aroused in you. For without that I am helpless to fight for you. "So, in your own way, you will live life through, knowing that in me you will always have an unchanged friend--even though the lover died when you became a wife. Is all clear between us now? * * * * * "If you are ever in town, or passing through to Newport or Bar Harbour, stop and inspect our gallery. "It is really quite pretty and some of the pictures are excellent. You should see it now--sunlight slanting in through the dusty bay-window, Dankmere at a long polished table doing his level best to assemble certain old prints out of a portfolio containing nearly a thousand; pretty little Miss Vining, pencil in hand, checking off at her desk the reference books we require in our eternal hunt for information; I below stairs in overalls if you please, paint and varnish stained, a jeweller's glass screwed into my left eye, examining an ancient panel which I strongly hope may have been the work of a gentleman named Bronzino--for its mate is almost certainly the man in armour in the Metropolitan Museum. "Strelsa, it is the most exciting business I ever dreamed of. And the beauty of it is that it leads out into everything--stretches a thousand sensitive tentacles which grasp at knowledge of beauty everywhere--whether it lie in the sombre splendour of the tapestries of Bayeux, of Italy, of Flanders; or deep in the woven magnificence of some dead Sultan's palace rug; or in the beauty of the work of silversmiths, goldsmiths, of sculptors in ivory or in wood long dead; or in the untinted marbles of the immortal masters.