self which it had been possible that I could love. He
was welcome to the mere doll who was wanted simply that she should
grace his equipage. I have asked myself, Why is it that I am so
sorely driven, seeing that in truth I do not love her? I would not
have her now for all the world. I know well how providential has been
my escape. And yet I go about like a wounded animal, who can find
none to consort with him. Till I met you, and learnt to talk to you,
I was truly miserable. And why? Because I had been saved from falling
when standing on a precipice! Because the engine had not been allowed
to crush me when passing along on its iron road! Ought I not to
rejoice and be thankful rather, as I think of what I have escaped?
But in truth it is the poor weakness of human nature. People say that
I have been--jilted. What matters it to me what people say? I have
been saved, and as time goes on I shall know it and be thankful."

Every word of it came home to her and gave her back her own story.
There was her own soreness, and her own salvation. There was the
remembrance of what the people in Exeter were saying of her, only
slightly relieved by the conviction that she had been preserved from
a life of unhappiness. But she had never been able to look at it
quite as he did. He knew that the better thing had happened to him;
but she, though she knew it also, was sore at heart because people
told the story, as she thought, to her discredit. There was, indeed,
this difference between them. It was said truly of him that the girl
had jilted him, but falsely of her that she had been jilted.

She, however, told him nothing of her own life. There had come
moments in which she was sorely tempted. But she had allowed them to
pass by, telling herself on each occasion that this at any rate was
not the moment. She could not do it now,--or now,--or now, lest there
should seem to be some peculiar motive on her own part. And so the
matter went on till there had arisen a feeling of free confidence on
the one side, and of absolute restraint on the other. She could not
do it, she said to herself. Much as she trusted Mr. Western, deeply
as she regarded him as her friend, strongly as she wished that the
story had been told to him at some former passage of their intimacy,
the proper time had passed by, she said, and he must be left in his
ignorance.

Then one day there happened that which the outside world at Rome
had long expected; and among the numbe