and pities me. I can laugh at it
as bitterly as the hardest man who tosses it from him in contempt. I
loved her! Feel for me, or despise me, I confess it with the same
immovable resolution to own the truth.

Was there no excuse for me? There was some excuse to be found, surely,
in the conditions under which my term of hired service was passed at
Limmeridge House.

My morning hours succeeded each other calmly in the quiet and seclusion
of my own room. I had just work enough to do, in mounting my
employer's drawings, to keep my hands and eyes pleasurably employed,
while my mind was left free to enjoy the dangerous luxury of its own
unbridled thoughts. A perilous solitude, for it lasted long enough to
enervate, not long enough to fortify me. A perilous solitude, for it
was followed by afternoons and evenings spent, day after day and week
after week alone in the society of two women, one of whom possessed all
the accomplishments of grace, wit, and high-breeding, the other all the
charms of beauty, gentleness, and simple truth, that can purify and
subdue the heart of man. Not a day passed, in that dangerous intimacy
of teacher and pupil, in which my hand was not close to Miss Fairlie's;
my cheek, as we bent together over her sketch-book, almost touching
hers. The more attentively she watched every movement of my brush, the
more closely I was breathing the perfume of her hair, and the warm
fragrance of her breath. It was part of my service to live in the very
light of her eyes--at one time to be bending over her, so close to her
bosom as to tremble at the thought of touching it; at another, to feel
her bending over me, bending so close to see what I was about, that her
voice sank low when she spoke to me, and her ribbons brushed my cheek
in the wind before she could draw them back.

The evenings which followed the sketching excursions of the afternoon
varied, rather than checked, these innocent, these inevitable
familiarities. My natural fondness for the music which she played with
such tender feeling, such delicate womanly taste, and her natural
enjoyment of giving me back, by the practice of her art, the pleasure
which I had offered to her by the practice of mine, only wove another
tie which drew us closer and closer to one another. The accidents of
conversation; the simple habits which regulated even such a little
thing as the position of our places at table; the play of Miss
Halcombe's ever-ready raillery, al