changed to a little
Catholic church in a kind of mews in Mayfair, and there my Confessor was
an older man whose quivering voice seemed to search the very depths of
my being. He was deeply alarmed at my condition and counselled me to
pray to God night and day to strengthen me against temptation.

"The Evil One is besieging your soul, my child," he said. "Fight with
him, my daughter."

I tried to follow my ghostly father's direction, but how hard it was to
do so! Martin had only to take my hand and look into my eyes and all my
good resolutions were gone in a moment.

As a result of the fierce struggle between my heart and my soul my
health began to fail me. From necessity now, and not from design, I had
to keep my room, but even there my love for Martin was always hanging
like a threatening sword over my head.

My maid Price was for ever singing his praises. He was so bright, so
cheerful, so strong, so manly; in fact, he was perfect, and any woman in
the world might be forgiven if she fell in love with him.

Her words were like music in my ears, and sometimes I felt as if I
wanted to throw my arms about her neck and kiss her. But at other
moments I reproved her, telling her it was very wicked of her to think
so much of the creature instead of fixing her mind on the Creator--a
piece of counsel which made Price, who was all woman, open her sparkling
black eyes in bewilderment.

Nearly every morning she brought me a bunch of flowers, which Martin had
bought at Covent Garden, all glittering from the sunshine and damp with
the dew. I loved to have them near me, but, finding they tempted me to
think more tenderly of him who sent them, I always contrived by one
excuse or another to send them into the sitting-room that they might be
out of my sight at all events.

After a while Price, remembering my former artifice, began to believe
that I was only pretending to be ill, in order to draw Martin on, and
then taking a certain liberty with me, as with a child, she reproved me.

"If I were a lady I couldn't have the heart," she said, "I really
couldn't. It's all very well for us women, but men don't understand such
ways. They're only children, men are, when you come to know them."

I began to look upon poor Price as a honeyed fiend sent by Satan to
seduce me, and to say the truth she sometimes acted up to the character.
One day she said:

"If I was tied to a man I didn't love, and who didn't love me, and
somebody else, wor