“They are too much in love with each other and cannot talk sense, that’s what it is,” she told herself. “Ah, well, time enough! The brother and sister business is really nicer during the first mourning, when there should be no thoughts of ‘marrying, or giving in marriage.’” CHAPTER VII. FOUND IN AN OLD NOTEBOOK OF LILIA PYM’S. _October —, 18—._ If I do not tell someone, or something, I shall go mad! Oh! father, father, I loved you so; and what have you done to me? You could not help dying and leaving me, I know that. The relentless progress of atoms, whose rules no one is clear-brained or unprejudiced enough to discover, determined your death. But why, why did you degrade me so? I have been wandering in the dark among the pines, in the forlorn hope of meeting your spirit. I have been to the place in the churchyard where they buried you, to-day. I knew I could not see or hear you, but I thought my mind might feel your mind. I felt nothing—but that you—are—_not_. You are _not_. Terrible, cruel thought! And I have not the courage to kill myself and be _not_, as well. This man you have given me to, without asking me, holds me, holds every bit of me—body, heart, what they call mind and soul—everything. I feel I must do his will, and that my own will is as _not_ as you are. I rage and chafe like a chained beast, and every moment I feel my chains are getting less galling—presently, oh, father, father! they will be pleasant, like your chains were—then I shall love them—then they will crush me, and I shall not be your Lilia any more, but a little piece of another identity. It must have been your plan from the beginning. How you used to talk about him after that dreadful time in the hospital! You made him out a second “Hamlet,” only larger-minded, cleverer; but never said he was young and handsome. You must have purposely let me imagine him like your friends, that I might be surprised, that first time he came here. How well I remember one evening, when you and I were walking in the wood, and you were talking about him, and said he was coming! “At last I shall see this ancient ‘Hamlet’ of yours,” I said, and asked you if there had been an “Ophelia” in his story. “Scarcely time for that, yet,” you said, in a peculiar way of yours, that means I am all at sea—all in the dark about something. But I was not interested enough to think more about it. Then came the day, when a graceful, dark, young, prince-like creature walked across the lawn, and when I saw him I felt all paralysed. I felt nothing, thought nothing. He stupefied me. I only seemed to wake up when he went away; no, some hours after he went back to London, and then my whole being seemed to give one great cry of despair, like it did when Mr. Mervyn told me of your accident and that you were in the hospital.