Dear E * * *, he was so beautiful, so noble then, in the expression of that love so long concealed. The earth whirled around me, and his arm caught me falling unconsciously. When I came to myself I was resting on his bosom, confident of its strength as of a breastplate of iron, though I saw his eyes dim with tears. We rode homewards in silence. There was a beauty in the very stones beneath our feet. The wayside flowers had an odor too exquisite to the sense. The air and sky were filled with an influence too beautiful for earth. I was very, very happy. Could this feeling have rested in me, I had been content—faithful to my duty, as I had been taught—to have lived ever so. But my heart was now craving constantly the repetition of that moment. It could not be satisfied but in his presence. Hitherto patient only under a sense of wrong, I now began to be agitated by a passion in which every feeling of my life had centred. It is not necessary to recount all the conflicts which it brought to me, nor to trace the way in which my nobler nature sunk gradually before the threatened penalty of social destruction; it is enough to say that I was borne by it to the decision which involved my destiny, and I yielded to the social law for the last time, because I had not yet come to that point at which a woman, driven to the very presence of death by the pressure of a false relation, thinks at last for herself, and hesitates no longer how to shape her course, should even the remaining wreck of her life be dashed to destruction. Last autumn I began to feel myself breaking down. I could live thus no longer. When the time came we usually went to London, a while before the opening of Parliament, I felt that the crisis had come. If I went down with my husband in any hope of escaping the feelings that were mastering me, I knew well that on my return this life of passion would only recommence at sight of its object. If I remained alone, I believed I had strength to put it from me—I believed I could part with him, if for the days or weeks that would follow, after I had left him, I might meet no other gaze than God’s—if I might exhaust the despair that I well knew would follow in silence. I remained, therefore, at home. I was not deceived in myself. The artificial being they had created of me was strong enough to assert itself and to sacrifice the love that lay in my heart’s depths—but not till the last moment. It was only upon the very brink of my husband’s return, that, arousing myself from the brief dream of happiness into which, secure in his absence, I had weakly fallen, I could summon the energy to take the draught of agony which, I believed, the hand of duty had prepared for me. But further delay was now impossible.