“Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like⁠—should like so much!” she wrote the initial letters, i , y , c , f , a , f , w , h . This meant, “If you could forget and forgive what happened.”

He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, “I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.”