it must be
written, as there is much that will interest you as my
dearest friend, and much also that will concern yourself
should you ever become my wife. It may be that a point
will arise as to which you and your friends,--your father,
for instance, and your brother,--will feel yourselves
entitled to have a voice in deciding. It may be quite
possible that your judgment, or, at any rate, that of your
friends, may differ from my own. Should it be so I cannot
say that I shall be prepared to yield; but I will, at
any rate, enable you to submit the case to them with all
fairness.

I have told you more than once how little I have known
of my own family,--that I have known indeed nothing. My
mother has seemed to me to be perversely determined not to
tell me all that which I will acknowledge I have thought
that I ought to know. But with equal perversity I have
refrained from asking questions on a subject of which
I think I should have been told everything without
questioning. And I am a man not curious by nature as to
the past. I am more anxious as to what I may do myself
than as to what others of my family may have done before
me.

When, however, my mother asked me to go with her to Italy,
it was manifest that her journey had reference to her
former life. I knew from circumstances which could not
be hidden from me,--from her knowledge, for instance, of
Italian, and from some relics which remained to her of her
former life,--that she had lived for some period in this
country. As my place of birth had never been mentioned to
me, I could not but guess that I had been born in Italy,
and when I found that I was going there I felt certain
that I must learn some portion of the story of which I had
been kept in ignorance. Now I have learnt it all as far as
my poor mother knows it herself; and as it will concern
you to know it too, I must endeavour to explain to you all
the details. Dearest Fanny, I do trust that when you have
heard them you will think neither worse of me on that
account,--nor better. It is as to the latter that I am
really in fear. I wish to believe that no chance attribute
could make me stand higher in your esteem than I have come
to stand already by my own personal character.

Then he told her,--not, perhaps, quite so fully as the reader has
heard it told in the last chapter,--the st