A hundred little circumstances have revealed this to me, and the longer I dwell upon it the more agitating does the consideration become.  Heaven only can help me out of the terrible difficulty in which this places me.  I have done nothing to encourage him to be faithless to her.  I have studiously kept out of his way; have persistently refused to be a third in their interviews.  Yet all to no purpose.  Some fatality has seemed to rule, ever since he came to the house, that this disastrous inversion of things should arise.  If I had only foreseen the possibility of it before he arrived, how gladly would I have departed on some visit or other to the meanest friend to hinder such an apparent treachery.  But I blindly welcomed him—­indeed, made myself particularly agreeable to him for her sake.

There is no possibility of my suspicions being wrong; not until they have reached absolute certainty have I dared even to admit the truth to myself.  His conduct to-day would have proved them true had I entertained no previous apprehensions.  Some photographs of myself came for me by post, and they were handed round at the breakfast table and criticised.  I put them temporarily on a side table, and did not remember them until an hour afterwards when I was in my own room.  On going to fetch them I discovered him standing at the table with his back towards the door bending over the photographs, one of which he raised to his lips.

The witnessing this act so frightened me that I crept away to escape observation.  It was the climax to a series of slight and significant actions all tending to the same conclusion.  The question for me now is, what am I to do?  To go away is what first occurs to me, but what reason can I give Caroline and my father for such a step; besides, it might precipitate some sort of catastrophe by driving Charles to desperation.  For the present, therefore, I have decided that I can only wait, though his contiguity is strangely disturbing to me now, and I hardly retain strength of mind to encounter him.  How will the distressing complication end?

May 19.—­And so it has come!  My mere avoidance of him has precipitated the worst issue—­a declaration.  I had occasion to go into the kitchen garden to gather some of the double ragged-robins which grew in a corner there.  Almost as soon as I had entered I heard footsteps without.  The door opened and shut, and I turned to behold him just inside it.  As the garden is closed by four walls and the gardener was absent, the spot ensured absolute privacy.  He came along the path by the asparagus-bed, and overtook me.

‘You know why I come, Alicia?’ said he, in a tremulous voice.

I said nothing, and hung my head, for by his tone I did know.