if a
day passed without bringing him to see me.

'This was in the vacation time. At last he had to go up to London, and
left me, feeling very lonely. He offered to write to me, and I was
glad to accept. We corresponded the whole term, nearly every week,
and at Christmas he came down again.

'By this time some months had gone by since my father's loss, and I
was beginning to recover my ordinary spirits. George saw this; he gave
me more of his company than ever, and finally, before the Christmas
holidays were over, he told me that he loved me.

'You will think I ought to have been prepared for this. Perhaps
another girl would have been, but I can only say that it took me
completely by surprise. You see, I had never known any other young man
at all intimately, and George I had looked upon more as a brother than
anything else. When he spoke of love, my first feeling was one of
annoyance and fear. I shrank from answering, and when he pressed me I
asked him to let me have time to think it over. He wisely dropped the
subject, and before we got home he was chatting to me as familiarly as
ever.

'The result was that I began to think that the love which he offered
me was nothing very deep, but only a warm friendship like what I felt
for him. Then I reflected on my own position, as an orphan, dependent
on one who was no relation and might cast me adrift at any moment.
I realised what a loss it would be to be deprived of George's
friendship. I had never really felt anything that I could call love
for anyone else, and, in short, I reconciled myself by degrees to the
idea. At Easter of that year I accepted him.

'In all this I had made one great mistake. I thought George's feeling
towards me was a mild one. The moment we were engaged I found the very
opposite.

'When I first uttered the words which gave him the right to do so,
he clasped me to him with a transport which frightened me. It was
actually fierce in its intensity. He lost all that studied control
which he had maintained for so long, and fairly gave himself up to the
intoxication of his passion. Had I dreamed what his state of feeling
really was, I don't believe that I should ever have promised myself to
him. But it was too late to draw back. He had obtained a power over
me, from which I shrank, but of which I had no right to complain. I
became in a sense his slave, and he did with me what he chose.

'From that moment, unhappily, my own feelings towards him underw