Was I in earnest? Was I spontaneous? We were making love to each
other under false pretenses. Oh, what a fool I was to ask for Mrs.
Tenbruggen's advice!

A humiliating doubt has come to me suddenly. Has his heart been
inclining to Eunice again? After such a letter as she has written to
him? Impossible!

Three events since yesterday, which I consider, trifling as they may be,
intimations of something wrong.

First, Miss Jillgall, who at one time was eager to take my place, has
refused to relieve me of my housekeeping duties. Secondly, Philip has
been absent again, on another long walk. Thirdly, when Philip returned,
depressed and sulky, I caught Miss Jillgall looking at him with interest
and pity visible in her skinny face. What do these things mean?

I am beginning to doubt everybody. Not one of them, Philip included,
cares for me--but I can frighten them, at any rate. Yesterday evening,
I dropped on the floor as suddenly as if I had been shot: a fit of some
sort. The doctor honestly declared that he was at a loss to account for
it. He would have laid me under an eternal obligation if he had failed
to bring me back to life again.

As it is, I am more clever than the doctor. What brought the fit on
is well known to me. Rage--furious, overpowering, deadly rage--was the
cause. I am now in the cold-blooded state, which can look back at the
event as composedly as if it had happened to some other girl. Suppose
that girl had let her sweetheart know how she loved him as she had never
let him know it before. Suppose she opened the door again the instant
after she had left the room, eager, poor wretch, to say once more, for
the fiftieth time, "My angel, I love you!" Suppose she found her angel
standing with his back toward her, so that his face was reflected in the
glass. And suppose she discovered in that face, so smiling and so sweet
when his head had rested on her bosom only the moment before, the most
hideous expression of disgust that features can betray. There could
be no doubt of it; I had made my poor offering of love to a man who
secretly loathed me. I wonder that I survived my sense of my own
degradation. Well! I am alive; and I know him in his true character at
last. Am I a woman who submits when an outrage is offered to her? What
will happen next? Who knows? I am in a fine humor. What I have just
written has set me laughing at myself. Helena Gracedieu has one merit at
least--she is a very amusing person.