k me as convenient. We had both at all events other
business on hand; we were pressed with preparations for our marriage.

Mine were assuredly urgent, but I found as the days went on that
to believe what I "liked" was to believe what I was more and more
intimately convinced of. I found also that I didn't like it so much as
that came to, or that the pleasure at all events was far from being the
cause of my conviction. My obsession, as I may really call it and as
I began to perceive, refused to be elbowed away, as I had hoped, by my
sense of paramount duties. If I had a great deal to do I had still more
to think about, and the moment came when my occupations were gravely
menaced by my thoughts. I see it all now, I feel it, I live it
over. It's terribly void of joy, it's full indeed to overflowing of
bitterness; and yet I must do myself justice--I couldn't possibly be
other than I was. The same strange impressions, had I to meet them
again,'would produce the same deep anguish, the same sharp doubts, the
same still sharper certainties. Oh, it's all easier to remember than to
write, but even if I could retrace the business hour by hour, could find
terms for the inexpressible, the ugliness and the pain would quickly
stay my hand. Let me then note very simply and briefly that a week
before our wedding-day, three weeks after her death, I became fully
aware that I had something very serious to look in the face, and that if
I was to make this effort I must make it on the spot and before
another hour should elapse. My unextinguished jealousy--_that_ was the
Medusa-mask. It hadn't died with her death, it had lividly survived,
and it was fed by suspicions unspeakable. They _would_ be unspeakable
to-day, that is, if I hadn't felt the sharp need of uttering them at the
time.

This need took possession of me--to save me, as it appeared, from my
fate. When once it had done so I saw--in the urgency of the case,
the diminishing hours and shrinking interval--only one issue, that of
absolute promptness and frankness. I could at least not do him the wrong
of delaying another day, I could at least treat my difficulty as
too fine for a subterfuge. Therefore very quietly, but none the less
abruptly and hideously, I put it before him on a certain evening that
we must reconsider our situation and recognise that it had completely
altered.

He stared bravely. "How has it altered?" "Another person has come
between us." He hesitated a moment. "I w