Ferris, proprietor of a tourist's hotel on the Lake of Como!
Confess that the idea was an absurdity! As for me, I will confess
that I did very wrong. Had I known all the truth on that
afternoon—do you remember the thunderstorm? I would have saved you
much, and I should have saved myself—well—something. But we have
better things to do than to run after shadows. Perhaps it is as
well not even to think of them. It is all over now. Whatever you
may think of it all, forgive your old friend,
Maria Consuelo d'A."
Orsino read the long letter to the end, and sat a while thinking over the contents. Two points in it struck him especially. In the first place it was not the letter of a woman who wished to call back a man she had dismissed. There was no sentiment in it, or next to none. She professed herself contented in her life, if not happy, and in one sentence she brought before him the enormous absurdity of the marriage he had once contemplated. He had more than once been ashamed of not making some further direct effort to win her again. He was now suddenly conscious of the great influence which her first letter, containing the statement of her parentage, had really exercised over him. Strangely enough, what she now wrote reconciled him, as it were, with himself. It had turned out best, after all.