"The relations with my mother, which I wrote to you before were so satisfactory, became worse and worse in consequence of my decided refusal to accept Felix as my husband, until an open rupture, which I had long seen coming, was inevitable. I have borne myself in the whole affair as I thought I owed it to myself and to you. It was a fierce battle, I assure you. To oppose my mother requires courage, and my father supported me but feebly, for he is feeble. Well! the battle is over; the dead are buried, and the wounds begin to heal. Yes, Mary! the dead. My Bruno, my pride, my knight, _sans peur et sans reproche_, my brother, my friend, my darling Bruno, is no more! He died fighting for me, and has breathed the last of his young, heroic soul in a kiss upon my lips. The fierce grief about this loss--for I only knew what he had been to me when I had him no longer--made me dull and indifferent to everything and everybody around me. As this boy loved me, no one on earth ever can and will love me again. I was light and air to him; I was meat and drink to him; I was waking and sleeping--I was life itself to him. How often have I laughed at him when he told me so, with glowing cheeks and bright eyes and trembling lips! And I said, 'Come, Bruno, none of your extravagancies! none of your fables! you are a little fool!' Now I would give many a year of my life if I could but hear it once more from his proud lips. A suspicion, which I cannot shake off, tells me that I would have found in Bruno and with Bruno all the happiness that this earth can afford; and that in losing him I have lost every prospect of happiness here below. You smile; you think: a boy! but I tell you, you did not know Bruno. "Do not ask me to repeat everything in detail. I cannot do it. My heart is too full. The remembrance of my lost pet does not leave me for a moment, and I should like nothing better than to lay down my pen and to cry to my heart's content. Tell me, Mary, is it really our fate, as we have so often told each other in sad hours, to go through life unsatisfied, without joy, without happiness, without the hope that the future at least may bring us the fulfilment of our wishes? Is fortune ever to appear to us only as a _fata morgana_--charming in its beauty and treacherously fleeting? Or is it ever to present itself only in a shape which, however great the inner value may be, offends our delicacy--our prejudices, if you choose to call them so? Your lot, to be sure, it seems, is to be different. In the same circles to which you belong by birth and training, you have found the man who would have been dear to your heart even if your judgment should not have approved of the choice of your heart. A man, a hero, a lord! Happy, thrice happy you are to have found one to whom you have to look up, proud as you are! Smile with your aristocratic curve of the lip upon--your friend at the boarding-school!