This sight, which recalled so vividly our happy life by the river, made me still more depressed.
I went slowly home with the fatal letter in my hand.
As soon as I had lighted the lamp I began to look at it more closely. The moisture had loosened the gum so much that the envelope was only fastened in one single spot.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to open and to close it without being discovered.
This thought made me turn hot and cold; I threw it on the table in terror, and kept on walking round the room and glancing at it as I walked.
Suddenly I had the letter in my hand and was picking with my nail at the closed spot; but, as if it had only been done in a fit of abstraction, I quickly turned the letter over and eagerly examined the address.
If I had so far been able to doubt whether the handwriting was Minna's, my uncertainty quickly vanished.
But a certain circumstance occurred to me; both the address and the piece of prose by Goethe in the poetry-book had been written in the same reddish and rather muddy ink which I thought was very probably to be obtained from the Rathen grocer. If this was the case I was, without doubt, the cause of the insertion of that lovely fragment, and this thought made me regard the tiresome letter with greater equanimity.
I took a piece of notepaper and wrote to Minna that, this letter, which evidently she had lost, had been found and brought to me, but that I did not like to post it without her consent, as the address seemed to have suffered a good deal from the damp, and was so illegible that I thought she might prefer to have the letter returned to her.
I then put a big wrapper round the whole thing, ad-
