“Dear, dear Hetty, sweet as our love has been to me, sweet as it would be to me for you to love me always, I feel that it would have been better for us both if we had never had that happiness, and that it is my duty to ask you to love me and care for me as little as you can.  The fault has all been mine, for though I have been unable to resist the longing to be near you, I have felt all the while that your affection for me might cause you grief.  I ought to have resisted my feelings.  I should have done so, if I had been a better fellow than I am; but now, since the past cannot be altered, I am bound to save you from any evil that I have power to prevent.  And I feel it would be a great evil for you if your affections continued so fixed on me that you could think of no other man who might be able to make you happier by his love than I ever can, and if you continued to look towards something in the future which cannot possibly happen.  For, dear Hetty, if I were to do what you one day spoke of, and make you my wife, I should do what you yourself would come to feel was for your misery instead of your welfare.  I know you can never be happy except by marrying a man in your own station; and if I were to marry you now, I should only be adding to any wrong I have done, besides offending against my duty in the other relations of life.  You know nothing, dear Hetty, of the world in which I must always live, and you would soon begin to dislike me, because there would be so little in which we should be alike.

“And since I cannot marry you, we must part—­we must try not to feel like lovers any more.  I am miserable while I say this, but nothing else can be.  Be angry with me, my sweet one, I deserve it; but do not believe that I shall not always care for you—­always be grateful to you—­always remember my Hetty; and if any trouble should come that we do not now foresee, trust in me to do everything that lies in my power.

“I have told you where you are to direct a letter to, if you want to write, but I put it down below lest you should have forgotten.  Do not write unless there is something I can really do for you; for, dear Hetty, we must try to think of each other as little as we can.  Forgive me, and try to forget everything about me, except that I shall be, as long as I live, your affectionate friend,

“Arthur Donnithorne.”

Slowly Hetty had read this letter; and when she looked up from it there was the reflection of a blanched face in the old dim glass—­a white marble face with rounded childish forms, but with something sadder than a child’s pain in it.  Hetty did not see the face—­she saw nothing—­she only felt that she was cold and sick and trembling.  The letter shook and rustled in her hand.  She laid it down.  It was a horrible sensation—­this cold and trembling.  It swept away the very ideas that produced it, and Hetty got up to reach a warm cloak from her clothes-press, wrapped it round her,