f visits, and more charming people in the
neighborhood to see, will any good Christian forgive me, if I own that I
took advantage of being alone to damn the neighborhood, and to feel
relieved by it?

Now that I was no longer obliged to listen to polite strangers, my
thoughts reverted to Cristel, and to the suspicions that she had roused
in me.

Recovering its influence, in the interval that had passed, my better
nature sharply reproached me. I had presumed to blame Cristel, with
nothing to justify me but my own perverted view of her motives. How did I
know that she had not opened that door, and gone to that side of the
cottage, with a perfectly harmless object in view? I was really anxious,
if I could find the right way to do it, to make amends for an act of
injustice of which I felt ashamed. If I am asked why I was as eager to
set myself right with a miller's daughter, as if she had been a young
lady in the higher ranks of life, I can only reply that no such view of
our relative positions as this ever occurred to me. A strange state of
mind, no doubt. What was the right explanation of it?

The right explanation presented itself at a later time, when troubles had
quickened my intellect, and when I could estimate the powerful influence
of circumstances at its true value.

I had returned to England, to fill a prominent place in my own little
world, without relations whom I loved, without friends whose society I
could enjoy. Hopeful, ardent, eager for the enjoyment of life, I had
brought with me to my own country the social habits and the free range of
thought of a foreign University; and, as a matter of course, I failed to
feel any sympathy with the society--new to me--in which my lot had been
cast. Beset by these disadvantages, I had met with a girl, possessed of
remarkable personal attractions, and associated with my earliest
remembrances of my own happy life and of my mother's kindness--a girl, at
once simple and spirited; unspoilt by the world and the world's ways, and
placed in a position of peril due to the power of her own beauty, which
added to the interest that she naturally inspired. Estimating these
circumstances at their true value, did a state of mind which rendered me
insensible to the distinctions that separate the classes in England,
stand in any need of explanation? As I thought--and think still--it
explained itself.

My stepmother and I parted on the garden terrace, which ran along the
pleasant s