THE END OF THE THIRD BOOK.
BOOK THE FOURTH.
CHAPTER I.
MISS GWILT'S DIARY.
"NAPLES, October 10th.--It is two months to-day since I declared
that I had closed my Diary, never to open it again.
"Why have I broken my resolution? Why have I gone back to this
secret friend of my wretchedest and wickedest hours? Because I am
more friendless than ever; because I am more lonely than ever,
though my husband is sitting writing in the next room to me. My
misery is a woman's misery, and it _will_ speak--here, rather
than nowhere; to my second self, in this book, if I have no one
else to hear me.
"How happy I was in the first days that followed our marriage,
and how happy I made _him_! Only two months have passed, and that
time is a by-gone time already! I try to think of anything I
might have said or done wrongly, on my side--of anything he might
have said or done wrongly, on his; and I can remember nothing
unworthy of my husband, nothing unworthy of myself. I cannot even
lay my finger on the day when the cloud first rose between us.
"I could bear it, if I loved him less dearly than I do. I could
conquer the misery of our estrangement, if he only showed the
change in him as brutally as other men would show it.
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