"Suppose she writes that she loves me, and awaits happiness from me, that her love can outbalance a whole lost world, that she is ready to follow me across the sea, beyond the mocking sneers of acquaintances, and to disappear with me among the hosts of forgotten figures!
"No. I shall not break open this letter.
"My last step shall not be hesitating.
"And if what seems such a chance meeting is nought but a well planned revenge? If they have all along been agreed and have only come here together that they may force me to confess that I am humiliated, that I beg for happiness, for love, that I am afraid of death because I am in love with the smiling faces of life; and when I have confessed that, they will laugh in my face, and will leave me to the contempt of the whole world, of my own self....
"Let them marry each other!"
Lorand took the beautiful note and locked it up in the drawer of his table, unopened, unread.
His last thought must be that perhaps he had been loved, and that last thought would be lightened by the uncertainty: only "perhaps."
And now to prepare for that journey.
It was Lorand's wont to carry two good pistols on a journey. These he carefully loaded afresh, then hid them in his own traveling trunk.
He left his servant to pack in the trunk as much linen as would be enough for two weeks, for they were going to journey farther.