oughts that have grown out of my
interview with him and out of all that has happened to me since that
time?

"Or shall I keep his secret as I promised? and keep my own secret too,
by bringing this weary, long letter to an end at the very moment when
you are burning to hear more!

"Those are serious questions, Mrs. Oldershaw--more serious than you
suppose. I have had time to calm down, and I begin to see, what I
failed to see when I first took up my pen to write to you, the wisdom of
looking at consequences. Have I frightened myself in trying to frighten
_you_? It is possible--strange as it may seem, it is really possible.

"I have been at the window for the last minute or two, thinking. There
is plenty of time for thinking before the post leaves. The people are
only now coming out of church.

"I have settled to put my letter on one side, and to take a look at my
diary. In plainer words I must see what I risk if I decide on trusting
you; and my diary will show me what my head is too weary to calculate
without help. I have written the story of my days (and sometimes the
story of my nights) much more regularly than usual for the last week,
having reasons of my own for being particularly careful in this respect
under present circumstances. If I end in doing what it is now in my
mind to do, it would be madness to trust to my memory. The smallest
forgetfulness of the slightest event that has happened from the night of
my interview with Midwinter to the present time might be utter ruin to
me.

"'Utter ruin to her!' you will say. 'What kind of ruin does she mean?'

"Wait a little, till I have asked my diary whether I can safely tell
you."

X. MISS GWILT'S DIARY.

"July 21st, Monday night, eleven o'clock.--Midwinter has just left me.
We parted by my desire at the path out of the coppice; he going his way
to the hotel, and I going mine to my lodgings.

"I have managed to avoid making another appointment with him by
arranging to write to him to-morrow morning. This gives me the night's
interval to compose myself, and to coax my mind back (if I can) to my
own affairs. Will the night pass, and the morning find me still thinking
of the Letter that came to him from his father's deathbed? of the night
he watched through on the Wrecked Ship; and, more than all, of the first
breathless moment when he told me his real Name?

"Would it help me to shake off these impressions, I wonder, if I made
the effort of writing them