Nearly every morning she brought me a bunch of flowers, which Martin had bought at Covent Garden, all glittering from the sunshine and damp with the dew.  I loved to have them near me, but, finding they tempted me to think more tenderly of him who sent them, I always contrived by one excuse or another to send them into the sitting-room that they might be out of my sight at all events.

After a while Price, remembering my former artifice, began to believe that I was only pretending to be ill, in order to draw Martin on, and then taking a certain liberty with me, as with a child, she reproved me.

“If I were a lady I couldn’t have the heart,” she said, “I really couldn’t.  It’s all very well for us women, but men don’t understand such ways.  They’re only children, men are, when you come to know them.”

I began to look upon poor Price as a honeyed fiend sent by Satan to seduce me, and to say the truth she sometimes acted up to the character.  One day she said: 

“If I was tied to a man I didn’t love, and who didn’t love me, and somebody else, worth ten of him was ready and waiting, I would take the sweet with the bitter, I would.  We women must follow our hearts, and why shouldn’t we?”

Then I scolded her dreadfully, asking if she had forgotten that she was speaking to her mistress, and a married woman; but all the while I knew that it was myself, not my maid, I was angry with, for she had only been giving voice to the thoughts that were secretly tormenting me.

I had been in bed about a week when Price came with a letter in her hand and a look of triumph in her black eyes and said: 

“There, my lady!  What did I tell you?  You’ve had it all your own way and now you’ve driven him off.  He has left the hotel and gone to live on his ship.”

This frightened me terribly, and partly for that reason I ordered her out of the room, telling her she must leave me altogether if she ever took such liberties again.  But I’m sure she saw me, as she was going through the door, take up Martin’s letter, which I had thrown on to the table, and press it to my lips.

The letter was of no consequence, it was merely to tell me that he was going down to Tilbury for a few days, to take possession of his old ship in the name of his company, but it said in a postscript: 

“If there’s anything I can do for you, pass me the word and I’ll come up like quick-sticks.”

“What can I do?  What can I do?” I thought.  Everything my heart desired my soul condemned as sinful, and religion had done nothing to liberate me from the pains of my guilty passion.

All this time my husband and Alma were busy with the gaieties of the London season, which was then in full swing, with the houses in Mayfair being ablaze every night, the blinds up and the windows open to cool the overheated rooms in which men and women could be seen dancing in closely-packed crowds.