of Alice was touching and true,
and I religiously resolved to undertake the part he pointed
out to me in the spirit of expiation, and while in one sense I
gave her my weak and unworthy support, on the other to cling
to her, as to my refuge and my shield, from a love and from a
hatred which made me equally tremble. The self-reproach which
had immediately followed my harsh condemnation of Henry, at
the very moment when he had made a great sacrifice in my
behalf, however incomplete its generosity might have been,
brought on as usual a reaction, and something of tenderness
stole into my heart at the thought of so deep, so
unconquerable an attachment as his. In Henry there always
seemed to me to be two different natures, one harsh, selfish,
sneering and heartless, the other tender almost as a woman's
is tender, and gentle even to a fault. Notwithstanding all
that I so often suffered from the first, I could not help
being at times strangely subdued and touched by the last. His
letter, too, like himself, appeared to have a two-fold
character, and as I considered it under each in turn, my heart
was alternately softened and hardened towards the writer.

Soon I experienced one of those changes of mood, one of those
abrupt transitions of feeling, which seem to transform us for
the time into a different sort of being from that with which
we are usually conscious of identity. A kind of feverish
determination to be happy took possession of me, a careless
disregard of the future, a sort of impassioned levity, of
reckless childishness. I walked up and down my room with
restless excitement; I longed now to return to London, to have
my marriage declared, to be congratulated, to be talked to, to
enter on a new state of things, and efface as much as
possible, from my life and from my mind, the traces of the
past.

When the next morning I got up and dressed, threw open my
window, looked upon the bright summer sky, and saw Edward
standing on the gravel walk before the house, my heart beat
with that hurried pulse of joy, that tumult of emotion which
drowns all thought and all care, as a whirlpool sucks in the
straws that float near it.

Edward beckoned to me to join him; he received me with a smile
of tenderness, and, pushing back the curls from my face,
whispered, "My dark-eyed Ellen!" His words of love sunk into
my heart, like the rain of Heaven on the scorched and burning
sands of the desert, as I gave utterance to the long-subdue