which he
has been the hero. Yes, I have resolved within my heart never to
follow my husband where he does not wish me to go. I will be the
divinity of his hearth. That is my religion of humanity. But why
should I not test and choose the man to whom I am to be like the
life to the body? Is a man ever impeded by life? What can that
woman be who thwarts the man she loves?--an illness, a disease,
not life. By life, I mean that joyous health which makes each hour
a pleasure.

But to return to your letter, which will always be precious to me.
Yes, jesting apart, it contains that which I desired, an
expression of prosaic sentiments which are as necessary to family
life as air to the lungs; and without which no happiness is
possible. To act as an honest man, to think as a poet, to love as
women love, that is what I longed for in my friend, and it is now
no longer a chimera.

Adieu, my friend. I am poor at this moment. That is one of the
reasons why I cling to my concealment, my mask, my impregnable
fortress. I have read your last verses in the "Revue,"--ah! with
what delight, now that I am initiated in the austere loftiness of
your secret soul.

Will it make you unhappy to know that a young girl prays for you;
that you are her solitary thought,--without a rival except in her
father and mother? Can there be any reason why you should reject
these pages full of you, written for you, seen by no eye but
yours? Send me their counterpart. I am so little of a woman yet
that your confidences--provided they are full and true--will
suffice for the happiness of your

O. d'Este M.

"Good heavens! can I be in love already?" cried the young secretary,
when he perceived that he had held the above letter in his hands more
than an hour after reading it. "What shall I do? She thinks she is
writing to the great poet! Can I continue the deception? Is she a woman
of forty, or a girl of twenty?"

Ernest was now fascinated by the great gulf of the unseen. The unseen
is the obscurity of infinitude, and nothing is more alluring. In that
sombre vastness fires flash, and furrow and color the abyss with fancies
like those of Martin. For a busy man like Canalis, an adventure of this
kind is swept away like a harebell by a mountain torrent, but in the
more unoccupied life of the young secretary, this charming girl, whom
his imagination persistently connected with the blonde beauty at
the wind