been able to stifle the dictates of
my heart. Love is so natural to a woman, that she is scarcely a woman
who resists it: but in me it has been a sentiment, not a passion.

"Sentiment, then, and vanity, have been my seducers. I said, that I
owed my errors to circumstances, not to nature. You will say, that
in confessing love and vanity to be my seducers, I contradict this
assertion--you are mistaken. I mean, that though vanity and sentiment
were in me, yet the scenes in which I have been placed, and the events
which I have witnessed, gave to those latent currents of action a wrong
and a dangerous direction. I was formed to love; for one whom I did love
I could have made every sacrifice. I married a man I hated, and I only
learnt the depths of my heart when it was too late.

"Enough of this; you will leave this country; we shall never meet
again--never! You may return to Paris, but I shall then be no more;
n'importe--I shall be unchanged to the last. Je mourrai en reine.

"As a latest pledge of what I have felt for you, I send you the enclosed
chain and ring; as a latest favour, I request you to wear them for six
months, and, above all, for two hours in the Tuileries tomorrow. You
will laugh at this request: it seems idle and romantic--perhaps it
is so. Love has many exaggerations in sentiment, which reason would
despise. What wonder, then, that mine, above that of all others, should
conceive them? You will not, I know, deny this request. Farewell!--in
this world we shall never meet again, and I believe not in the existence
of another. Farewell!

"E. P."

"A most sensible effusion," said I to myself, when I had read this
billet; "and yet, after all, it shows more feeling and more character
than I could have supposed she possessed." I took up the chain: it
was of Maltese workmanship; not very handsome, nor, indeed, in any way
remarkable, except for a plain hair ring which was attached to it, and
which I found myself unable to take off, without breaking. "It is a very
singular request," thought I, "but then it comes from a very singular
person; and as it rather partakes of adventure and intrigue, I shall at
all events appear in the Tuileries, tomorrow, chained and ringed."

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Thy incivility shall not make me fail to do what becomes me; and since
thou hast more valour than courtesy, I for thee will hazard that life
which thou wouldst take from me.--Cassandra, "elegantly done into
English by Si