Oh, to think! To think that at this very moment you, your own living self, are almost within reach of my voice! It would not take half an hour to bring me to your side. And once there, once in your actual presence--Oh, my God! This unceasing agony would be ended, this unutterable agony would be uttered. We two should be together once again--you and I. Oh, the joy, the joy, to sob out all our grief together, and soothe each other's pain! And yet, if I were at the other extremity of the earth, or if you were dead, it could not be more impossible, I could not be more hopeless. Christine! “But there! I am losing control of myself, crying out and raving in my despair. But what I have set myself to do, is to keep perfectly calm, and, by the aid of all my forces, to try to give you a clear statement of what I have been through. If I ever succeed in making you realize how thoroughly I have understood your pain, how completely I have appreciated the enormity of my own conduct, and how bitterly I have repented it, I shall be almost happy, and I shall have discharged a duty toward you--the only duty that I have a right any more to owe you. “Well, now, I tell you that in that one minute--in the time that elapsed from the instant I first caught sight of you, down to the instant when you disappeared in the street below--in that minute, with intensity proportionate to the rapidity, I lived through nearly every thing that I have lived through since. All my vivid realization of how utterly base I myself had been, and of your unspeakable agony, caused by me, your despair, your humiliation; all my remorse, my yearning to atone for what could never be atoned for, to repair the irreparable wrong that I had done; all my sense of what I had wantonly flung away, and lost beyond recovery; all my despair; in a word, all my love--love that had lain stunned, as I supposed _dead_, but now suddenly had come to, never to let me rest any more: these, and much else that I shall not attempt to reduce to words, these were what sprang upon me all at once, shaking my soul to its foundations, and holding me rigid, horrified, in their grasp. Oh, help me to find an expression for what strains so hard to be spoken. I have just read over what I have written. It sounds vague, cold, formal. If I had left the paper blank, it would have done about as well. What I have written conveys only the weak echo of what I want to say, of what I feel. I stood there in the lobby of Steinway Hall; and I watched you pass under my eyes; and I saw how pale you were, how large and dark and sorrowful your eyes were; and suddenly I knew, I understood, how I, my very self, had made you suffer, you whom I loved, and how never, never, no matter how long I might live, could I in any way do any thing to soothe you, to comfort you, to make up to you for the suffering I had caused you; I knew and understood all this; and my heart went out to you, bounding and burning with a thousand fierce