August 3.--It is almost exactly a year since I have written anything in my journal, which I find where I left it, forgotten in the corner of a drawer in the Cornish manor-house, to which we have gone back again this summer. I am glad to be here again, but, all the same, it is not quite as it was last year. The Baroness and I are better friends than ever. I am more accustomed to her, she is kindness itself. Ah yes, that is it. Her kindness begins to become fatiguing; I would prefer a little liberty. Why is it that good people forge chains with their kindness, adding link to link with the best intentions in the world, until one is tripped up and weighed down and held by the fetters of innumerable favours? To break so much as a link is held to be ingratitude. But one's liberty, then, is there anything comparable in the price one pays, and in the utmost one can receive in place of it? Is it that a woman is unable to conceive of the fatigue of kindness? How incomprehensible to them must be that marvellous sentence in 'Adolphe': 'Je me reposais, pour ainsi dire, dans l'indifférence des autres, de la fatigue de son amour.' And, even if it is not love, the heaviest of all burdens when it comes unasked, there is still a fatiguing weight in that affectionate vigilance which is one long appeal for gratitude, in that sleepless solicitude which 'prevents,' in both senses of the word, all one's goings. I am beginning to find this with the Baroness, who would replace Providence for me, but with a more continual intervention. * * * * *