“What causes for resentment can Dorothy conceivably have?” he repeated, in the same cold judicial tone. “It is possible to feel resentment, it is possible to nurse resentment, to let it hang as a heavy cloud-curtain between you and all you love the best, without any adequate cause, without any cause that you can see yourself when the fit is over!” My voice sounded strange and distant in my own ears: I held by the back of a chair to steady myself: but I was not fainting: I was acutely alive to all that was passing in my husband’s mind. He looked at me curiously, inquisitively, but not as if I belonged to him, and were part and parcel of his life. “You seem to be curiously familiar with a state of feeling which I should have judged to be the last a Christian lady would know anything about.” “Oh, my husband, don’t you see? You are killing me. I am not going through this anguish for nothing. I _do_ know what it is. And if Dorothy, my poor child, suffers, it is all my fault! There is nothing bad in her but what she has got from me.” George was moved; he put his arm round me in time to save me. But I was not surprised, a few days later, to find my first grey hairs. If that hour were to be repeated, I think I could not bear it. “Poor wife! I see; it is to yourself you have been savagely cruel, and not to our little girl. Forgive me, dear, that I did not understand at once; but we men are slow and dull. I suppose you are putting yourself (and me too) to all this pain because there is something to be gained by it. You see some way out of the difficulty, if there is one!” “Don’t say ‘if there is one.’ How could I go through all this pain if I did not think some way of helping our darling would come out of it?” “Ah! appearances were against you, but I knew you loved the child all the time. Clumsy wretch that I am, how could I doubt it? But, to my mind, there are two difficulties: First, I cannot believe that you ever cherished a thought of resentment; and next, who could associate such a feeling with our child’s angelic countenance? No, my dear; believe me, you are suffering under a morbid fancy. ’Tis you, and not Dorothy, who need entire change of scene and thought.” How should I convince him? And how again run the risk of his even momentary aversion? But if Dorothy were to be saved, the thing must be done. And, oh, how could he for a moment suppose that I should deal unlovingly with my firstborn? “Be patient with me, George. I want to tell you everything from the beginning.