room.

"He is thinking, I suppose? Well! I can think too. What am I to do next?
I shall wait and see. Events take odd turns sometimes; and events may
justify the fatalism of the amiable man in the next room, who curses the
day when he first saw my face. He may live to curse it for other reasons
than he has now. If I am the Woman pointed at in the Dream, there will
be another temptation put in my way before long; and there will be no
brandy in Armadale's lemonade if I mix it for him a second time."

"October 24th.--Barely twelve hours have passed since I wrote my
yesterday's entry; and that other temptation has come, tried, amid
conquered me already!

"This time there was no alternative. Instant exposure and ruin stared me
in the face: I had no choice but to yield in my own defense. In plainer
words still, it was no accidental resemblance that startled me at the
theater last night. The chorus-singer at the opera was Manuel himself!

"Not ten minutes after Midwinter had left the sitting-room for his
study, the woman of the house came in with a dirty little three-cornered
note in her hand. One look at the writing on the address was enough.
He had recognized me in the box; and the ballet between the acts of the
opera had given him time to trace me home. I drew that plain conclusion
in the moment that elapsed before I opened the letter. It informed me,
in two lines, that he was waiting in a by-street leading to the beach;
and that, if I failed to make my appearance in ten minutes, he should
interpret my absence as my invitation to him to call at the house.

"What I went through yesterday must have hardened me, I suppose. At any
rate, after reading the letter, I felt more like the woman I once
was than I have felt for months past. I put on my bonnet and went
downstairs, and left the house as if nothing had happened.

"He was waiting for me at the entrance to the street.

"In the instant when we stood face to face, all my wretched life with
him came back to me. I thought of my trust that he had betrayed; I
thought of the cruel mockery of a marriage that he had practiced on me,
when he knew that he had a wife living; I thought of the time when I had
felt despair enough at his desertion of me to attempt my own life. When
I recalled all this, and when the comparison between Midwinter and the
mean, miserable villain whom I had once believed in forced itself into
my mind, I knew for the first time what a woman feels when e