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Rh seated, to enforce perfect silence, to take out my work, and to commence it amidst the profoundest and best trained hush, ere M. Emanuel entered with his vehement burst of latch and panel, and his deep, redundant bow, prophetic of choler.

As usual he broke upon us like a clap of thunder; but instead of flashing lightning-wise from the door to the estrade, his career halted midway at my desk. Setting his face towards me and the window, his back to the pupils and the room, he gave me a look—such a look as might have licensed me to stand straight up and demand what he meant—a look of scowling distrust.

"Voilà! pour vous", said he, drawing his hand from his waistcoat, and placing on my desk a letter—the very letter I had seen in Rosine's hand—the letter whose face of enameled white and single Cyclop's-eye of vermilion-red had printed themselves so clear and perfect on the retina of an inward vision. I knew it, I felt it to be the letter of my hope, the fruition of my wish, the release from my doubt, the ransom from my terror. This letter M. Paul, with his unwarrantably interfering habits, had taken from the portress, and now delivered it himself.

I might have been angry, but had not a second for the sensation. Yes: I held in my hand not a slight note, but an envelope which must, at least, contain a sheet; it felt not flimsy, but firm, substantial, satisfying. And here was the direction, "Miss Lucy Snowe", in a clean, clear, equal, decided hand; and here was the seal, round, full, deftly dropped by untremulous fingers, stamped with the well-cut impress of initials, "J. G. B." I experienced a happy feeling, a glad emotion which went warm to my heart and ran lively through all my veins. For once a hope was realized. I held in my hand a morsel of real solid joy, not a dream, not an image of the brain, not one of those shadowy chances imagination pictures, and on which humanity starves, but cannot live; not a mess of that manna I drearily eulogized awhile ago, which, indeed, at first melts on the lips with an unspeakable and preternatural sweetness, but which, in the end, our souls full surely loathe, longing deliriously for natural and earth-grown food, wildly praying Heaven's Spirits to reclaim their own spirit-dew and essence—an aliment divine, but for mortals deadly. It was neither sweet hail, nor small coriander-seed;