“To follow your counsel, and take my destiny into my own hands by one wild leap into the bliss my heart calls for, would be to risk his anger without the assurance that ultimately I should be forgiven. Do not urge me to it, I beseech you. My father ill and alone! The thought would make a mockery of my happiness. It would be a pall upon my bridal robes. Forgive me, Madame. I love you for your wish to help me, though the effort be ineffectual. If I boldly seem to criticise, believe me, it is with no intention to wound. You will think me a coward, perhaps, for I know that it is different with the women of your race. They act without scruple for themselves, and their parents have no other choice than to yield to theirs. But I cannot bring myself to regard this as right. _He_ cannot surely desire that I should come to him thus--with the stain of strife and revolt upon our love. You see I am fastidiously jealous of the future. It is so fatally easy for the young, upon the impetus of ungovernable passion, to let themselves be precipitated into rash errors: so difficult to recover forfeited ground.
“But how fervently I thank you for your sweet sympathy and your offer of a home until such time as another would be mine, I have not words to say. Your heart must be fresh to be so tenderly open to the sorrows of the young. I shall bless the day that brings us face to face. If you would visit our island! But we are so rough and backward, and the stillness, I fear, would prove oppressive to one from a country where, I am assured, movement is the extremity of haste. And yet I love the place all the more from my short absence from it. It was like heaven to see it again, to feel the untrodden ground beneath my feet, to watch the unfretted stars from a world below as uneager and as changeless. The seasons are not more regular than our habits, and excitement is undreamed of by us. The villagers come to me with their simple woes, and I comfort them and doctor them, and instil into them such wisdom as my young head has mastered. Sometimes my dear father comes to my help,--not often, for they are less afraid of me. It is, I suppose, because I am nearer to them.
“This letter shames me, it is so idle and garrulous. What have I to say but that I love you, Madame,--I love you, and beg you to accept the assurance of my heartfelt gratitude and my affectionate friendship.