'Take her this card, if you please,' he said quietly, 'and tell her that I am the bearer of a message from Mr. Griswold.' In a few minutes the servant returned. 'Walk this way, if you please,' she said; 'Mrs. Griswold will see you.' And muttering to himself, 'I thought so,' Trenton Warren marched onward to the assault. CHAPTER IV. HELEN'S DIARY. 'I am to write my letters to him, Alston says, in the form of a journal, so that when I send them off each week, he may be able "to follow my life from day to day through all the familiar hours of it, and so to cheat himself out of the sense of separation." These are Alston's words, not mine; I have it not in me to think these thoughts, and so the words would not come. 'And why, I wonder? Am I a heartless woman, or ungrateful, or only commonplace, and unable to understand the way in which things present themselves to Alston? At all events, it will do me no good to think about myself; I shall come to no better liking for myself, to no clearer conclusion about myself, by questions of this kind. If I cannot quite understand him, I can at least perfectly obey him, and, please God, I will do that, as I have always done it; and as he has said I am to keep a journal, I will keep a journal. So I begin it thus, in an irregular and unskilful fashion, no doubt, but with the utmost sincerity of intention to write in it everything which can interest him (according to his scale and meaning of interest, not of my own), on the very day after his departure. 'As I know that nothing can be regularly done which is not done at a set hour, I will begin my journal with a rule for the writing of it. It is to be for Alston; it is to be his share in the day during his absence, and it shall be done during that hour when I was always with him, just before I went up-stairs to see baby fast asleep, and to go to bed myself; after every one was gone, when we had company at home; when we had returned, if we had been out, and when we compared notes of our impressions of the place and the people. In Alston's room, at Alston's desk, my letter-journal shall be written, and it may be I shall get over the shyness and the discomfort with which the notion of writing to him inspires me now, in the custom and familiarity of the time, and be able to persuade myself that I am only talking to him.