Never--never! I shall be wretched throughout life: I shall know that you
are free that you--oh! Constance! you might be mine!--but she shall never
dream what she has cost me! I have been too cold, too ungrateful to her
already--I will make her amends. My heart may break in the effort, but it
shall reward her. You, Constance, in the pride of your lofty station,
your strengthened mind, your regulated virtue (fenced in by the hundred
barriers of custom), you cannot, perhaps, conceive how pure and devoted
the soul of this poor girl is! She is not one whom I could heap riches
upon and leave:--my love is all the riches she knows. Earth has not a
consolation or a recompense for the loss of my affection: and even Heaven
itself she has never learned to think of, except as a place in which we
shall be united for ever. As I write this I know that she is sitting afar
off and alone, and thinking only of one whose whole soul, fated and
accursed as he is, is maddened by the love of another. My letters,
her only comfort, have been cold and few of late; I know how they have
wrung her heart. I picture to myself her solitude--her sadness--her
unfriended youth--her ardent mind, which, not enriched by culture, clings,
feeds, lives only on one idea. Before you receive this, I shall be on the
road to her. Never again will I risk the temptation I have under gone. I
am not a vain man; I do not deceive myself; I do not imagine, I do not
insult you by believing, that you will long or bitterly feel my loss. I
have loved you far better than you have loved me, and you have uncounted
channels for your bright hopes and your various ambition. You love the
world, and the world is at your feet! And in remembering me now, you may
think you have cause for indignation. Why, with the knowledge of a tie
that forbade me to hope for you, why did I linger round you? why did I
give vent to any word, or license to any look, that told you I loved you
still? Why, above all, on that fated yesterday, when we stood alone
surrounded by the waters,--why did I dare forget myself--why clasp you to
my breast--why utter the assurance of that love which was a mockery, if I