er off as a
single woman--unless--unless you are very fond of your husband--but
you won't be very fond of anybody but me, will you?" She stopped again,
crossed my hands on my lap, and laid her face on them. "Have you been
writing many letters, and receiving many letters lately?" she asked, in
low, suddenly-altered tones. I understood what the question meant, but
I thought it my duty not to encourage her by meeting her half way.
"Have you heard from him?" she went on, coaxing me to forgive the more
direct appeal on which she now ventured, by kissing my hands, upon
which her face still rested. "Is he well and happy, and getting on in
his profession? Has he recovered himself--and forgotten me?"

She should not have asked those questions. She should have remembered
her own resolution, on the morning when Sir Percival held her to her
marriage engagement, and when she resigned the book of Hartright's
drawings into my hands for ever. But, ah me! where is the faultless
human creature who can persevere in a good resolution, without
sometimes failing and falling back? Where is the woman who has ever
really torn from her heart the image that has been once fixed in it by
a true love? Books tell us that such unearthly creatures have
existed--but what does our own experience say in answer to books?

I made no attempt to remonstrate with her: perhaps, because I sincerely
appreciated the fearless candour which let me see, what other women in
her position might have had reasons for concealing even from their
dearest friends--perhaps, because I felt, in my own heart and
conscience, that in her place I should have asked the same questions
and had the same thoughts. All I could honestly do was to reply that I
had not written to him or heard from him lately, and then to turn the
conversation to less dangerous topics.

There has been much to sadden me in our interview--my first
confidential interview with her since her return. The change which her
marriage has produced in our relations towards each other, by placing a
forbidden subject between us, for the first time in our lives; the
melancholy conviction of the dearth of all warmth of feeling, of all
close sympathy, between her husband and herself, which her own
unwilling words now force on my mind; the distressing discovery that
the influence of that ill-fated attachment still remains (no matter how
innocently, how harmlessly) rooted as deeply as ever in her heart--all
these are d