"It is true, I am very comfortable at this boarding-school. They treat me, not as a pupil, but as a guest, and I am sincerely grateful to the principal, a Miss Bear, for her goodness, and the delicate consideration with which she treats me, as if she knew all. Perhaps she does know all. Such events, in families like ours, are not apt to remain unknown. Have I not myself learnt much about my own engagement only several weeks afterwards, and not from my father, with whom I have corresponded all the time, and who has even come to see me several times from Grenwitz (my mother, who I am told is here in Grunwald, has broken off all intercourse with me), but from a young lady, a Miss Sophie Roban, a former boarder here, whose acquaintance I have made, and with whom I have even formed a kind of friendship. She is engaged to our physician at Grenwitz, who has recently settled here, and thus her news seems to be reliable. She told me what had occurred after my departure from Grenwitz, and what papa had carefully kept from me; that the young man, of whom I wrote you already last summer, our tutor, Doctor Stein, has become my knight and my avenger, inasmuch, at least, as he has fought a duel with Felix, and given my great cousin a lesson which he will probably not forget very soon, as I learn from the same authority. I cannot tell you how strangely this news has affected me. At first--I may confess to you--my pride was offended that my name should be coupled in the world with the name of a man like Mr. Stein; that a stranger, a hireling, should have assumed responsibilities for me, as if he were a relative, and my equal in rank. But then I thought of the old saying, 'that if the people were silent the stones would speak;' I remembered that a brother could not have behaved more brotherly, nor a knight more chivalrously toward me than this man had done from the first moment. I recalled, above all, that this man was my Bruno's dearest friend, and I forgot my pride, and felt, not without wondering at myself, that I could be grateful to this man for his great kindness and affection without feeling, as I generally do, that this gratitude weighs upon me as a burden. Nay, even more, I felt the desire to see him, who was abroad, once more, in order to thank him in person, and when I saw him to-day, quite unexpectedly, pass by the window at which I was sitting, I felt--you will laugh at me, Mary--I felt that as I returned his bow the blood rushed into my face. When he had gone by I could not help following him with my eye, and then I leaned back in the window and wept bitter tears over the memory of Bruno, which the appearance of Stein had suddenly and powerfully revived in my mind. I wish I could speak to him undisturbed. "But I must break off here. I hear Miss Roban, who comes to play with me, and Miss Bear, in the next room."