my reasons for this final and irrevocable doom.

We were children together. Though we leant so lightly in our
conversations of this spring upon all we knew in common, I know your age
and all your strong early experience--and you know mine. Your mother
will recall that day's riding when I came back from my first leave and
you were home, not, I think, for good, from the convent. A fixed
domestic habit blinded her, so that she could then still see in us no
more than two children; yet I was proud of my sword, and had it on, and
you that day were proud of a beauty which could no longer be hidden even
from yourself; I would then have sacrificed, and would now, all I had or
was or had or am to have made that beauty immortal.

I say, you remember that day's riding, and how after it the world was
changed for you and me, and how that same evening the elders saw that it
was changed.

You will remember that for two years we were not allowed to meet again.
When the two years were passed we met indeed by a mere accident of that
rich and tedious life wherein we were both now engaged. I was returned
from leave before Tournay; you had heard, I think, a false report that I
had been wounded in the dreadful business at Fontenoy (which to remember
even now horrifies me a little). I had heard and knew which of the great
names you now bore by marriage. The next day it was your husband who
rode with me to Marly. I liked him well enough. I have grown to like him
better. He is an honest man, though I confess his philosophers weary me.
When I say "an honest man" I am giving the highest praise I know.

My dear, that was sixteen years ago.