Sitting down this morning to make a beginning towards the fulfilment of my promise to my husband, I ask myself if I am indeed the same person as I was when he left me. It seems to me that a great gulf lies between me and that time, and that the experience which I have gained of human nature and of the possibilities of life has completely changed me. With all the relief which the absence of Alston's friend has given me there is a great pang of pain for Alston himself, and a horrid sense of a barrier of concealment between us. I have allowed so many days to elapse before I force myself into commencing this self-communing, in sheer uncertainty of what my line of duty is, and though I am now tolerably clearly convinced that neither now nor ever must I reveal to Alston what has passed, the conviction invests my task of writing to him with great pain and difficulty. Somehow we seem to be doubly parted; first by distance, then by secret. Will this additional sense of parting yield even to his return? How shall I bear to see him take up his relations with Warren just where he dropped them, and to know, as I do know, how his confidence is betrayed? Not in business matters, I daresay; so far as I understand anything about them, there is no likelihood that Alston's interests and Warren's could ever clash, and so far he is safe. It would do my husband such harm in every way to know what has occurred; his own frankness and loyalty of nature could hardly withstand so great a shock; the world would be changed for him. No, he shall never know it; I will trust to the chapter of accidents, or rather, I should say, to the beneficence of Providence, to preserve us harmless from his false friend.