Arrived in his room, Delmar directed Bertram to his writing-table. "Sit there," he said; "take a sheet of paper, and write. I will dictate to you a letter that shall serve as the last chapter of the miserable romance of your betrothal. You shall extricate yourself from this wretched business as a man of honour; at least you shall appear such in Fräulein Schommer's eyes. It is of course more than you deserve, and is probably great folly on my part; it is not done for your sake, but because I owe some reparation to Fräulein Schommer for a former unjust estimate of her, and I should like to save her from the humiliating conviction that she has been betrothed to so utter a scoundrel as yourself. Therefore I will surround your brow with the halo of high-souled renunciation. Write!" Bertram bit his lips, not daring to vent the rage that was consuming him. Without a word of reply he took up a pen, and wrote down the words which Delmar, standing behind him, dictated over his shoulder. "Four terrible, agonizing weeks have I passed, weeks in which each day was torture to me. With every miserable hour I have become more and more clearly convinced that you, dearest Eva, have accorded me a right to remain near you as your betrothed only in consequence of a promise too hastily given. I have seen that your heart belongs to another, and that it never can be mine. "I do not blame you; I only bewail the ill fortune that shatters all my life's fairest hopes. I should be indeed lost to all sense of honour if I attempted to hold you, my beloved Eva, to a promise given me when you were ignorant of your own heart. You, at least, shall not be unhappy. I give back to you the faith which your inexorable sense of rectitude forbids you to recall. I voluntarily release you from your engagement. "I shall not, I cannot, see you again. It is with the deepest pain that I leave you, but there is some consolation for me in the thought that you will not think of me with hatred, but will accord me some measure of friendly remembrance in the knowledge that I have sacrificed my happiness to yours. "Guido von Bertram." The letter was written. Paul took it, and read it aloud, laughing bitterly as he finished it. "Excellent!" he said; "an epistle which might worthily find a place in any romance, and which is certainly not dear at five thousand thalers. Uncle Balthasar may still speak with genuine emotion of his 'dear Guido;' the fair Eva may think kindly of the noble self-renunciation that inspired the letter, and perhaps privately repent that she did the writer such injustice. Even Leo will shake his head, unable to conceive how such words could have been written by him who penned them. Seal it with your signet-ring, and I myself will deliver it to Fräulein Schommer."