Miriam was in all the beauty of womanhood; Cornelius in all the fervour of man's young love. She was with him almost all the day long, not alone, but with the check of a constant presence that irritated the fever liberty and untroubled solitude might have soothed to satiety; and this, or I am much deceived, she knew well. He had to repress himself perpetually, in a way which must have been wearying and painfully irksome. His temper was too generous to wreak itself upon me, but I became conscious of a most galling and yet most inevitable truth: in that studio where I had won my place by so much perseverance; where I had shown to Cornelius a faith so entire and unshaken; where I, a child, and restless as all children are more or less, had been the patient slave of his art; where Cornelius had always welcomed me with a greeting so sincere and so cordial in its very homeliness; yes, there, even there, I was no longer welcome. Daily, hourly, I read in his face, in his eyes, in his voice, that my presence was burdensome, my absence a release. I knew it, and I had to endure it; I had to be ever drinking this last sickening drop of a cup that was never drained. I was jealous: and the word sums up all my miseries. I was also what is called a precocious child, and perhaps I felt more acutely than many; I say _perhaps_, for jealousy is an instinct,--is not the dog jealous of its master?--assuredly it is not a feeling that waits for years or knowledge. It is the very shadow of love; and who yet watched the birth of love in a human heart? I loved Cornelius as an ardent and jealous daughter loves her father, and I was miserable because he bestowed on another that which I neither could wish for, nor even imagine the wish to claim. As was my love, so was my jealousy, filial and childlike: a jealousy of the heart, in which not the faintest trace of any other feeling blended. It was sinful, but it was pure. I did not suffer because Cornelius was in love with Miriam, but because he loved her. If, at twelve, I could have understood and separated feelings that blend so strangely in the heart, I know that I would not have envied Miriam one spark of the passion, but I know that I would still, as I did bitterly, have grudged her every atom of the tenderness. If I did not feel jealousy in that mysterious intensity which has stung so many hearts to madness. I felt it in its calmer bitterness and more patient sorrow. The peculiar agony of this tormenting passion seems to me to lie in the blending of two most opposite feelings: love, from which it springs, and hatred, which it engenders; it has thus the warmth of one and the fierceness of the other, and there also lies the evil and the danger. I loved Cornelius, I detested Miriam. My only salvation from what might have been the utter ruin of my soul, heart, mind, and whole nature, was that I loved him infinitely more than I hated her; woe to me had it been otherwise!