a special pleasure after she has been out enjoying her secret meetings to invent a new story with which to deceive her mother.
No, dearest, you must not think of me like that. Certainly there is nothing in the world I would not do to be able to come to you. I don't complain. I don't want you to think I consider my happiness too dearly bought. On the other hand I should not like you to think that I take it all too lightly.
Then there are the days between our meetings. Of course you are unable to understand that three or four days can be an eternity. You have so many things to interest you. Your work, your pleasures, your life is in a world where every hour of the day brings new nourishment, new material. But when I am away from you existence closes round me like prison walls, whose only warmth is my longing for you, whose only colouring is my memory of your brightness. But how should you be able to understand anything of all this. You, who only see a happy face come and go, who know nothing of the life which belongs to the happy face from the moment it nods a smiling farewell until it next laughs a joyful greeting to you.
But should your thoughts ever, when I am away from you, try to follow me, and had they the power to see through doors and walls, they would see the happy face changed into a picture of doleful misery. I don't know how it is, it may be wrong and ungrateful of me, but the first day's radiant happiness, which carried me over all worries
