“It was nearly three years after the period to which I have alluded that an accident of which I need not remind you, my beloved Helen, introduced me to the acquaintance of your family. You may remember the backwardness with which I first received their approaches; the very name of Percy had become ominously painful to me, and yet it inspired me with a strange and undefinable interest. A spell appeared to attract me towards you, and in spite of my first resolution to the contrary, in spite of the melancholy reserve that still dwelt upon my mind, I became an acquaintance, and at length the favoured inmate and friend, of your father. Could I imagine the dangers that lurked beneath his roof? could I believe that while I thus once more indulged in the social converse to which I had been long a stranger, I should gain the affections of his child? The playful girl towards whom my age enabled me to assume an almost parental authority, while I exercised, in turn, the parts of playmate and preceptor, beloved as she was in all the charms of her dawning beauty, and artless naiveté, inspired me with no deeper sentiment; not even when I saw her gradually expand into the maturer pride of womanhood, and acquire that feminine gentleness, that dignified simplicity of character, which had attracted me in Theresa Marchmont. Early in our intercourse, I had acquainted Lord Percy that the confinement of a beloved wife in a state of mental derangement, was the unhappy cause of my dejection and wandering habits of life; and I was rejoiced to perceive that his own seclusion from the world had prevented him from hearing my history related by others. He was also ignorant of the name and connexions of the lady to whom he knew his beloved and lamented son to have been attached; little indeed did he suspect his own share in producing my domestic calamity. “The disparity of our years, and their knowledge of my own previous marriage, prevented them from regarding with suspicion the partiality displayed by their Helen for my society, and the influence which I had unconsciously acquired over her feelings. For a length of time I was myself equally blind, and the moment I ventured to fear the dangers of the attachment she was beginning to form. I took the resolution of tearing myself altogether from her society, and without the delay of an hour, I returned to Silsea.