position that otherwise might have arisen--besides no
amount of reasoning can restore her to life._

"_Suddenly I thought of the letter, which I still had in my pocket, and
I told the count about it, for all discretion was then superfluous. He
hastily seized it, for a moment I thought he would open it to see if it
contained any intimation that--but then he read the address aloud and
was gentleman enough to return it to me; 'take care of it,' said he,
'and write him about--' here his voice failed, and he sank down in a
chair beside the bed of his beautiful dead wife._

"_Here is the letter entrusted to me; I feel sure it will furnish no
new disclosures, none that could be new to me. I know what I know, and
voices from the grave even, could not change my conviction._

"_I have been very prolix, but you, as an intimate friend of the
departed, will not find these details too minute. Remember me to your
honored wife; I regret that there is so little prospect of a
continuance of our recent acquaintanceship, but the count leaves in a
few days for the East, and I accompany him. So with sincere regards, my
dear friend, I remain,_

"_Yours_

"Dr. Basler.

"_Address to the castle as before; all correspondence will be
forwarded!_"

The note enclosed in the doctor's letter ran as follows:

"_You will be alarmed, my dear friend, that I already write you again.
But fear nothing, it is for the last time, and means little more than
the card inscribed P. P. C. which we leave with our friends before a
long separation, I am going away on a journey, dear friend, far enough
away to enable you to feel perfectly secure from any molestation on my
part. How this has come about is a long story. Suffice it to say,
that it is not envy of the laurels won by my beautiful fair-haired
sister-in-law--_I_ mean those she will undoubtedly win as a high-born,
intellectual, and pious traveler--that induces me also to seek a change
of air. If that which I breathe were but conducive to my health, if I
could but sleep and wake, laugh and weep like other men and women, I
certainly would not stir from the spot. But even my worst enemy could
hardly fail to understand that matters can not go on any longer as they
are; so I prefer to go. The 'promised land' has long allured me. I
should have set out for it before, if I had not had much to expect, to
hope, and to wait