The secret which that confession discloses should be told with
little effort, for it has indirectly escaped me already. The poor
weak words, which have failed to describe Miss Fairlie, have
succeeded in betraying the sensations she awakened in me. It is
so with us all. Our words are giants when they do us an injury,
and dwarfs when they do us a service.
I loved her.
Ah! how well I know all the sadness and all the mockery that is
contained in those three words. I can sigh over my mournful
confession with the tenderest woman who reads it and pities me. I
can laugh at it as bitterly as the hardest man who tosses it from
him in contempt. I loved her! Feel for me, or despise me, I
confess it with the same immovable resolution to own the truth.
Was there no excuse for me? There was some excuse to be found,
surely, in the conditions under which my term of hired service was
passed at Limmeridge House.
My morning hours succeeded each other calmly in the quiet and
seclusion of my own room. I had just work enough to do, in
mounting my employer's drawings, to keep my hands and eyes
pleasurably employed, while my mind was left free to enjoy the
dangerous luxury of its own unbridled thoughts.
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