"Here is something in your handwriting," she said, "which you may be
sorry to lose."

He was confounded. Is she dissembling? he thought to himself. Does she
know what is in the note, or is she deceived by the resemblance of the
hand? He hoped, he believed the latter. He was warned--doubly warned;
but those strange accidents, through which a higher intelligence seems
to be speaking to us, his passion was not able to interpret. Rather, as
he went further and further on, he felt the restraint under which his
friend and his wife seemed to be holding him the more intolerable. His
pleasure in their society was gone. His heart was closed against them,
and though he was obliged to endure their society, he could not succeed
in re-discovering or in re-animating within his heart anything of his
old affection for them. The silent reproaches which he was forced to
make to himself about it were disagreeable to him. He tried to help
himself with a kind of humor which, however, being without love, was
also without its usual grace.

Over all such trials Charlotte found assistance to rise in her own
inward feelings. She knew her own determination. Her own affection, fair
and noble as it was, she would utterly renounce.

And sorely she longed to go to the assistance of the other two.
Separation, she knew well, would not alone suffice to heal so deep a
wound. She resolved that she would speak openly about it to Ottilie
herself. But she could not do it. The recollection of her own weakness
stood in her way. She thought she could talk generally to her about the
sort of thing. But general expressions about "the sort of thing," fitted
her own case equally well, and she could not bear to touch it. Every