I need not tell you that I read the letters to me which you wrote to Jack. But the sequel of your story is wrong, dear knight. After a long famine, out of a very wilderness of sorrows, it is I who return to you. And I wonder if you will recognise in the poor little bedraggled vixen that I now am, the gay lady dryad with whom you walked that day in the forest when we met the witch. You may be shocked to learn, however, that I hold you more than half accountable for the misfortunes that have befallen me since! You should have saved _me_ instead of attempting to slay the witch. But you allowed me to depart, a dejected fiction of filial piety, to become the victim of a fanatical father's ethics. Why did you consent to this sacrilege? For, indeed, I hold it as much a sacrilege to change a Jessica into a deaconess as it would be to turn a Christian into a Hottentot,--provided either were possible.
I admit that it was I who ended our engagement and forbade you to come here; but that was only a part of _my_ delusion, not _yours_! But why did you not rescue me from these delusions? Are they not more terrible than the beasts at Ephesus? Really I know not which of us has showed less wisdom,--you who stayed to slay a metaphorical witch created of your own heated imagination, or I, with all my hopes unfulfilled, turning aside to follow one whose prophecies carry him out of the world rather than into it. And I do not know what has been the result of your mistake, but with me it has been war. I have been like a small province in rebellion, burning and slaying all within my borders. I am a heathen Hittite in father's vineyard. I have profaned all his scriptures and confounded all his doctrines, until I think now the only boon he prays for is deliverance.
But one thing I have learned, dear knight of my heart,--submitting to a paternal edict does not change the course of nature, although true love often runs less smoothly on that account. You cannot make a wren out of a redbird, even if you are the God of both. And not all the prayers in heaven can save a little white moth from her candle, once she has felt it shining upon her wings. Just so, some charm of light in you, some clear illumination of things that reaches far beyond all the doctrines I know, draws me like a destiny. It does not appear whether I shall live in a gay rhythm around it or drop dead in the flame, and it no longer matters. Like the poor moth, all I know is that I can neither live nor die apart from it.