"At this instant fate and my ever-cruel destiny brought into my presence Edgar Sellick. He had been like myself hard at work, and had become weary, and anxious perhaps for a change, or, as I am now compelled to think, eager to talk of one whose very existence I was tempted to forget when she was, as then, away from home. He had come into the room where I was, and was standing, flushed and handsome, in the one bright streak of sunlight that flashed at that moment over the floor. I had always liked him, and thought him the only real gentleman in town, but something quite new in my experience made my heart swell as I met his eyes that day, and though I will not call it love (not now), it was something which greatly moved me and made me feel that in the gaze and seeming interest of this man I saw the true road to happiness and to the only life which would ever really satisfy me. For, let it be my excuse, under all my vanity, a vanity greater for the seeming check it had received, dwelt an ardent and irrepressible desire for affection, such affection as I had never received since my dying mother laid her trembling hand upon my head and bade me trust the good God for a happiness I had never possessed. My disfigurement owed its deepest sting to the fact, never revealed to others before, and scarcely acknowledged to myself then, that it stood in the way, as I thought, to my ever being passionately beloved. When, therefore, I saw the smile on Dr. Sellick's face, and realized that he was looking for me, I rose up with new hopes in my heart and a new brightness in my life. "But we said nothing, he or I, beyond the merest commonplaces, and had my powers of observation been as keen then as they are now, since a new light has been shed upon those days, I would have perceived that his eye did not brighten when it rested upon me, save when some chance mention was made of Emma, and of the pleasures she was enjoying abroad. But no doubts came to me at that time. Because my heart was warm I took it for granted that his was so also, and not dreaming of any other reason for his attentions than the natural one of his desiring my society for its own sake, I gradually gave myself up to a feeling of which it is shame now for me to speak, but which, as it was the origin of all my troubles, I must compel myself to acknowledge here in all its force and fervor. "The fact that he never uttered a word of love or showed me any attention beyond that of being constantly at my side, did not serve to alarm or even dispirit me. I knew him to have just started upon his career as physician, and also knew him to be proud, and was quite content to cherish my hopes and look towards a future that had unaccountably brightened into something very brilliant indeed.