having been suddenly obliged to leave home
for the sea-side, put her villa at my disposal, and hoped I
would stay there as long as might suit me. This opened a new
source of embarrassment to me. I could not resolve with myself
whether to accept this offer or to refuse it. If Henry was
determined to force his visits upon me, I felt that I should
be more unprotected at Hampstead, less able to exclude him
there than in town, and yet I was afraid that Edward should
suppose I was not prepared in everything to follow his
directions. I determined at last to write to him that Mrs.
Moore had left Hampstead, and that I should therefore remain
in town till I heard from him again, or till the blessed
moment of his return. As I looked over my letter I seized the
pen and scratched oat that word _blessed_, which he would have
branded with hypocrisy. Never did a letter of a few lines cost
such painful labour or such anxious thought as that I sent to
Edward in return for his. Many and many a foul copy I wrote,
in which protestations and prayers, self-accusations and
passionate justifications, succeeded each other with frantic
vehemence; but as I read over these bursts of feeling, these
impassioned appeals, I tore them up and gave them to the
flames; for to disobey him _now_, was to endanger the frail
tenure by which I clung to him, and, as he had said himself,
to drive him from me; and yet to accept the conditions of
pardon, to submit humbly to the terms held out to me, was a
tacit admission of the truth of his accusations and of the
justice of my condemnation.

At one moment I resolved to brave his anger; boldly and
earnestly to declare to him my innocence, not from crime only,
but from a feeling or a thought inconsistent with the truest
and most ardent affection that ever woman felt, or man
inspired; and, in defiance of his orders, but in the strictest
integrity of heart, to seek Henry, and by prayers, by
reproaches, by upbraidings, by all the power which a strong
will, and the consciousness of his unconquerable passion for
me, could give, to obtain from him a release from my oath, and
liberty to kneel at Edward's feet, and to clasp his knees,
with a confession of every sin, but that of not loving him.

But then, again, I shrank from the rash efforts, from the
fatal risks, which this plan involved, and it seemed to me
best to submit in humble resignation to his will; to accept
his mistaken severity, his coldness, and his scorn,