They look as if the ink was fading from them. If Grosse knew what I am
about at this moment! His last words to me, when he went back to his
patients in London, were:--"No more readings! no more writings till I
come again!" It is all very well to talk in that way. I have got so used
to my Journal that I can't do without it. Nevertheless, I must stop
now--for the best of reasons. Though I have got three lighted candles on
my table, I really cannot see to write any more.

To bed! to bed!

[Note.--I have purposely abstained from interrupting Lucilla's Journal
until my extracts from it had reached this place. Here the writer pauses,
and gives me a chance; and here there are matters that must be mentioned,
of which she had personally no knowledge at the time.

You have seen how her faithful instinct still tries to reveal to my poor
darling the cruel deception that is being practiced on her--and still
tries in vain. In spite of herself, she shrinks from the man who is
tempting her to go away with him--though he pleads in the character of
her betrothed husband. In spite of herself, she detects the weak places
in the case which Nugent has made out against me--the absence of
sufficient motive for the conduct of which he accuses me, and the utter
improbability of my plotting and intriguing (without anything to gain by
it) to make her marry the man who was not the man of her choice. She
feels these hesitations and difficulties. But what they really signify it
is morally impossible for her to guess.

Thus far, no doubt, her strange and touching position has been plainly
revealed to you. But can I feel quite so sure that you understand how
seriously she has been affected by the anxiety, disappointment, and
suspense which have combined together to torture her at this critical
interval in her life?

I doubt it, for the sufficient reason that you have only had her Journal
to enlighten you, and that her Journal shows she does not understand it
herself. As things are, it seems to be time for me to step on the stage,
and to discover to you plainly what her surgeon really thought of her, by
telling you what passed between Grosse and Nugent, when the German
presented himself at the hotel.

I am writing now (as a matter of course) from information given to me, at
an after-period, by the persons themselves. As to particulars, the
accounts vary. As to results, they both agree.

The discovery that Nugent was at Ramsgate necessarily took