As to unfavourable influences, ...  I can speak of them quietly, having foreseen them from the first, ... and it is true, I have been thinking since yesterday, that I might be prevented from receiving you here, and should, if all were known:  but with that act, the adverse power would end.  It is not my fault if I have to choose between two affections; only my pain; and I have not to choose between two duties, I feel, ... since I am yours, while I am of any worth to you at all.  For the plan of the sealed letter, it would correct no evil,—­ah, you do not see, you do not understand.  The danger does not come from the side to which a reason may go.  Only one person holds the thunder—­and I shall be thundered at; I shall not be reasoned with—­it is impossible.  I could tell you some dreary chronicles made for laughing and crying over; and you know that if I once thought I might be loved enough to be spared above others, I cannot think so now.  In the meanwhile we need not for the present be afraid.  Let there be ever so many suspectors, there will be no informers.  I suspect the suspectors, but the informers are out of the world, I am very sure:—­and then, the one person, by a curious anomaly, never draws an inference of this order, until the bare blade of it is thrust palpably into his hand, point outwards.  So it has been in other cases than ours—­and so it is, at this moment in the house, with others than ourselves.

I have your letter to stop me.  If I had my whole life in my hands with your letter, could I thank you for it, I wonder, at all worthily?  I cannot believe that I could.  Yet in life and in death I shall be grateful to you.—­

But for the paper—­no.  Now, observe, that it would seem like a prepared apology for something wrong.  And besides—­the apology would be nothing but the offence in another form—­unless you said it was all a mistake—­(will you, again?)—­that it was all a mistake and you were only calling for your boots!  Well, if you said that, it would be worth writing, but anything less would be something worse than nothing:  and would not save me—­which you were thinking of, I know—­would not save me the least of the stripes.  For ’conditions’—­now I will tell you what I said once in a jest....

’If a prince of Eldorado should come, with a pedigree of lineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand, and a ticket of good-behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel, in the other’—?

‘Why even then,’ said my sister Arabel, ‘it would not do.’  And she was right, and we all agreed that she was right.  It is an obliquity of the will—­and one laughs at it till the turn comes for crying.  Poor Henrietta has suffered silently, with that softest of possible natures, which hers is indeed; beginning with implicit obedience, and ending with something as unlike it as possible:  but, you see, where money is wanted, and where the dependence is total—­see!