Miss Rachel into a servant's dress, and took her
ornaments off? I don't know what is the use of my writing in this way.
It can't be denied that she had a bad figure; she was too thin. But
who can tell what the men like? And young ladies may behave in a manner
which would cost a servant her place. It's no business of mine. I can't
expect you to read my letter, if I write it in this way. But it does
stir one up to hear Miss Rachel called pretty, when one knows all the
time that it's her dress does it, and her confidence in herself.

"Try not to lose patience with me, sir. I will get on as fast as I can
to the time which is sure to interest you--the time when the Diamond was
lost.

"But there is one thing which I have got it on my mind to tell you
first.

"My life was not a very hard life to bear, while I was a thief. It
was only when they had taught me at the reformatory to feel my own
degradation, and to try for better things, that the days grew long and
weary. Thoughts of the future forced themselves on me now. I felt
the dreadful reproach that honest people--even the kindest of honest
people--were to me in themselves. A heart-breaking sensation of
loneliness kept with me, go where I might, and do what I might, and see
what persons I might. It was my duty, I know, to try and get on with my
fellow-servants in my new place. Somehow, I couldn't make friends with
them. They looked (or I thought they looked) as if they suspected what
I had been. I don't regret, far from it, having been roused to make the
effort to be a reformed woman--but, indeed, indeed it was a weary life.
You had come across it like a beam of sunshine at first--and then you
too failed me. I was mad enough to love you; and I couldn't even attract
your notice. There was great misery--there really was great misery in
that.

"Now I am coming to what I wanted to tell you. In those days of
bitterness, I went two or three times, when it was my turn to go out,
to my favourite place--the beach above the Shivering Sand. And I said to
myself, 'I think it will end here. When I can bear it no longer, I think
it will end here.' You will understand, sir, that the place had laid
a kind of spell on me before you came. I had always had a notion that
something would happen to me at the quicksand. But I had never looked
at it, with the thought of its being the means of my making away with
myself, till the time came of which I am now writing. Then I did think
that here