volumes, if I attempted to reproduce the subtle undercurrents of John
Gray's life and mine. Each of us was living a double life; he more or less
unconsciously; I with such sharpened senses, such overwrought emotions,
that I only wonder that my health did not give way. I endured vicariously
all the suspense and torment of the deepest jealousy, with a sense of more
than vicarious responsibility added, which was almost more than human
nature could bear. Ellen little knew how heavy would be the burden she
laid upon me. Her most express and explicit direction was that the
familiar intimacy between our family and Mrs. Long's was to be preserved
unaltered. This it would have been impossible for me to do if Mrs. Long
had not herself recognized the necessity of it, for her own full enjoyment
of John's society. But it was a hard thing; my aunt, the ostensible head
of our house, was a quiet woman who had nothing whatever to do with
society, and who felt in the outset a great shrinking from the brilliant
Mrs. Long. I had never been on intimate terms with her, so that John and
Alice were really the only members of the household who could keep up
precisely the old relation. And so it gradually came about that to most of
our meetings under each other's roofs, strangers were asked to fill up the
vacant places, and in spite of all Emma Long's efforts and mine, there was
a change in the atmosphere of our intercourse. But there was intimacy
enough to produce the effect for which Ellen was most anxious, i.e., to
extend the shelter of our recognition to the friendship between John and
Emma, and to remove from them both all temptation to anything clandestine
or secret. They still saw each other almost daily; they still shared most
of each other's interests and pleasures; they still showed most
undisguised delight in each other's presence. Again and again I went with
them to the opera, to the theatre, and sat through the long hours,
watching, with a pain which seemed to me hardly less than Ellen's would
have been, their constant sympathy with each other in every point of
enjoyment, their constant forgetfulness of every one else.

But there was, all this time, another side to John Gray's life, which I
saw, and Emma Long did not see. By every steamer came packages of the most
marvelous letters from Ellen: letters to us all; but for John, a diary of
every hour of her life. Each night she spent two hours in writing out the
record of the day. I hav