I trust this means at least a partial recovery of your fortune.

If it does, with fortune recovered responsibilities increase, and I choose to believe that it is these new and exacting duties which have prevented me from seeing you or from hearing from you for more than three weeks.
"But surely you could find a moment to write a line to a friend who is truly your very sincere well-wisher, and who would be the first to express her pleasure in any good fortune which might concern you.
"AILSA PAIGE." Two days passed, and her answer came: "Ailsa Paige, dearest and most respected, I have not forgotten you for one moment.

And I have tried very hard.
"God knows what my pen is trying to say to you, and not hurt you, and yet kill utterly in you the last kindly and charitable memory of the man who is writing to you.
"Ailsa, if I had known you even one single day before that night I met you, you would have had of me, in that single day, all that a man dare lay at the feet of the truest and best of women.
"But on that night I came to you a man utterly and hopelessly ruined--morally dead of a blow dealt me an hour before I saw you for the first time.
"I had not lived an orderly life, but at worst it was only a heedless life.

I had been a fool, but not a damned one.

There was in me something loftier than a desire for pleasure, something worthier than material ambition.