“I did.”
“Will you let me see it?”
“I am afraid I cannot properly do that.”
“I beg that you will, Mr. Spotswood. You would be doing me a very great favor, and for your cousin’s sake also I think I may venture to ask it. I was told that he was ‘fickle and capricious, incapable of a sustained affection,’ and much more in the same line. I should be truly glad to know that this was false.”
“I can give you my word for that.”
“But you can give me also his word, if you will,” she said, beseechingly. “Oh, my dear, dear friend, I too have suffered, and I believe that what I have endured is the worst of pain, for it comes from the knowledge of wrong to another. You cannot take away that pain, but perhaps you can restore to me a lost ideal. I had come to think that there was no such thing as love—real love—in the world; to believe not only that the man who had professed it for me was false in that profession, but that it really did not exist. Let me see that letter. It is an impersonal thing to me now, but I feel that it would strengthen me for all my future life. I am going to try to be good; indeed I am,” she said, her lips trembling like a child’s. “If I feel that that letter would help me, why may I not see it?”
The rector hesitated visibly; then he said:
“You shall see it, Bettina. I cannot feel that it will do any harm, and it will be an act of justice, perhaps, to him as well as to you. Whoever represented him to be lacking in depth of feeling has done him a wrong indeed. I had no need to have this proved to me, but if there be such a need in any breast, the reading of this letter must do away with it.”
In a few moments he rose to take leave, having promised to send the letter to her.
“Will you send it at once?” she asked. “May Nora go with you and bring it back?”