to my happiness, and that he was full of genuine joy at my departure.
Nevertheless he had a liking for me, and his friendship showed itself
touchingly through the cruel satisfaction that was mingled with it. He
expressed envy of my lot; proclaimed his enthusiasm for the cause of
independence; and declared that he himself had more than once felt
tempted to throw off the cassock and take up the musket. All this,
however, was mere boyish affectation; his timid, gentle nature always
kept him the priest under the mask of the philosopher.

Between these two letters I found a little note without any address,
which seemed as if it had been slipped in as an after-thought. I was not
slow to see that it was from the one person in the world who was of real
interest to me. Yet I had not the courage to open it. I walked up and
down the sandy beach, turning over this little piece of paper in my
hands, fearful that by reading it I might destroy the kind of desperate
calm my resolution had given me. Above all, I dreaded lest it might
contain expressions of thanks and enthusiastic joy, behind which I
should have divined the rapture of contented love for another.

"What can she be writing to me about?" I said to myself. "Why does she
write at all? I do not want her pity, still less her gratitude."

I felt tempted to throw this fateful little note into the sea. Once,
indeed I held it out over the waves, but I immediately pressed it to
my bosom, and kept it hidden there a few moments as if I had been a
believer in that second sight preached by the advocates of magnetism,
who assert that they can read with the organs of feeling and thought as
well as with their eyes.

At last I resolved to break the seal. The words I read were these: