"I asked Luigi before he left for Hammersmith to take me away from this dirty house. But he shrugged his shoulders and said he was too poor to move. I told him that the bad smell of the cooking made me sick, and that the landlady entertained foreigners, who came tramping in at all hours of the day, jabbering and singing like savages, and poisoning the place with the rank fumes of tobacco. 'You should write to your grandmother to send you some money,' said he, 'and then we will seek better apartments.' I told him I would not write to grandmamma again after her last letter, no, not if I were dying. 'Then I am too poor to help you,' he said, stroking his moustache and humming a tune, with an air of such cruel indifference that my eyes filled with tears, though my breast heaved with a passion I could not keep down. 'We have been married a little more than six months,' I said, 'and you are already tired of me.' 'And you of me,' said he. 'It is false!' I cried, in a rage; 'but I suppose you want an excuse for your increasing indifference, and would tell a lie rather than not have one.' 'You did not bring me any money,' he replied, 'and yet you are always grumbling at our poverty. Don't I work like a slave for what I get? 'Tis a pity you are not more educated, for you might go out as a governess, and together we could earn a competence.' 'I did not marry to become a governess,' I said, 'and if you love me as you once professed, you could not name such a scheme.' He made a gesture of impatience, and uttered something in Italian. 'What do you say?' I exclaimed. He gave a shrug and left the room. And this is what my dream of love has come to! O how could I moralise if I were not the text! Patience? Yes, I could be patient if I had something solid to hold. But can I be patient holding sand, and watching the grains slipping through my fingers? Oh! my weariness of heart! and my head aches so I can hardly see this paper." Here there was a leaf torn out. The next entry was dated exactly a year after. The records now became rhapsodical. Strange dreams were chronicled, and conversations which she had held in her sleep. The first entry spoke of her delight with Elmore cottage. What followed was full of brief references to the past, especially to the events of the year she had omitted to record. Yet brief as they were I could gather the story. Her husband had deserted her, possibly on the very date of the last entry I have transcribed. By her allusions to her feelings, the shock of his leaving her must have driven her almost mad. "I would thrust him deep, deep into the _hell_ he has lighted in my heart against him; but he comes before me in the night when I am numbed by sleep and am powerless to thrust him off. O what a hate his face drives into me!"